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Femme nue assise Encre sur papier, signée en bas à droite 26.8 x 44.2 cm - 10 1/2 in x 17 1/2 in Ink on paper, signed lower right PROVENANCE: Collection privée, Paris (acquis vers fin juin 1996) BIBLIOGRAPHIE: Wong Rita, L'inventaire des dessins, Index of drawing, The li Ching cultural and educational foundation, Taiwan, 2015, D0027 p.10 Sanyu is an Asian painter who left China early in the 20th century to complete his artistic training in Paris, the capital of the avantgarde. The initial years of artistic effervescence in Montparnasse having come to an end, Sanyu benefitted from the support of a number of western patron friends and mentors. Little known in his lifetime, he was neither prolific nor did he particularly seek to promote his work, so he was forgotten by the end of the 1960s. Thanks to works reappearing on the market over the last twenty years, the talent of Sanyu has recently been brought to light. His art now receives attention from critics, and collectors see in Sanyu an unparalleled synthesis of the sense of forms both from Asia and the West. A Chinese childhood Sanyu came from a wealthy family in Sichuan Province where, according to recent research, he was probably born in 1895. His father, an animal painter specialized in lions an dhorses, taught his son the rudiments of his art and allowed him to follow the teaching of Zhao Xi, the renowned calligrapher. Sanyu’s older brother encouraged his passion and supported him financially when, after a brief stay in Japan and inspired by a spate of students choosing to travel to France, Sanyu moved to Paris to study art in 1921. In China, which was struggling with modernization, these young idealists imagined they could revolutionize Chinese art through exposure to the western painters of the avant-garde. They knew how to portray reality as it was, as it physically appeared, and as they felt it. This was very much theopposite to their country’s ancestral traditions which for millennia had prefered journeys of the mind without leaving room for individual perceptions of reality. A young Chinese painter in Paris Upon arriving in 1921, Sanyu signed up for classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he spent time with his Chinese comrades, in particular with Xu Beihong and his wife, in the early 1920s. Comfortable financially thanks to his older brother’s support, he gradually loosened ties with his companions to dedicate his time to academic figure drawing classes. This demonstrated his interest in an iconic subject of western painting, toward which he sought to move closer. He applied the method of Chinese calligraphy, which consisted of reproducing one character until perfect mastery, and made manifold sketches with distinctly defined brushstrokes. From 1925 onward, he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne (in 1925 and 1928) and sometimes in Parisian galleries. He made his first oil paintings in 1929, thereby achieving complete integration while his fellow countrymen often kept to rice paper, silk, ink, and calligraphy brushes.