1990s Two Beetles Chinese Black and Red Ink and Color Painting by Lu Huan Wang

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Two dung beetles face each other across a dung ball in this small ink and color painting by Lu Huan … Read more Two dung beetles face each other across a dung ball in this small ink and color painting by Lu Huan Wang (Wang Luhuan, born 1948). A spray of grasses enters from the lower right, painted with wet and dry brushstrokes, fingertip dabs of ink that show the artist’s fingerprints, and splashes of crimson over the black. A horizontal inscription reading right to left, 道不清, roughly “it cannot be said clearly,” runs along the bottom and ends in the artist’s signature and a red seal. The work is on gold-edged paper-faced board in shikishi format, with a sight size of 10.5 by 9.5 inches.

Wang was born in Hebei Province, graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1969, and spent sixteen years as an artist-in-residence at the Palace Museum. He is best known for minutely detailed stone carvings of insects and amphibians, which are held by the Palace Museum and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. He remained in the United States after a 1989 exhibition tour and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. The freehand treatment of the foliage belongs to the xieyi tradition and parallels the New Literati painting that emerged in China in the late 1980s, while the insects show the close observation of his carving.

The attribution rests on the brushed signature and seal, which compare closely with signatures on the artist’s known works, and on a San Francisco Bay Area gallery label. The painting dates to about 1990, shortly after the artist settled in California. It is presented in an acid-free mat with acid-free backing and framed under standard glass. Photographs were white-balanced to a gray card under daylight-balanced lighting; colors may display slightly differently across screens. See less