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Chang Yu is one of the most important Chinese artists in the 20th century.

He is known as "the last gentle nobleman in China".

He was a scholar who worked with Xu Beihong, Lin Fengmian and Liu Haisu in the 1920s.

Among the same group of artists studying in France,

The only Chinese to enter the core art circle in the West.

He and Giacometti were good friends.

Picasso painted a portrait of him.

But in the end, due to the decline of his family,

No one appreciates the painting.

Died alone in his Paris apartment,

The savings after death can't even afford a cemetery...

Nowadays, no one doesn’t want to own a Changyu.

His most expensive painting,

In 2019, it exceeded RMB 270 million.

This is the highest-priced piece of art by Chang Yu ever auctioned.

And all this,

This is inseparable from the research and promotion of one person for more than 30 years - Yi Shufan.

Yi Shufan talks with Yitiao at her home in Taipei

“I have done three things in my life:

Studying, Sotheby's and writing about Chang Yu.

Jiang Xun often said,

I am Sanyu’s spiritual wife.”

In May this year,

One is on Yangmingshan Mountain in Taipei.

I saw someone who just came from Hong Kong

After the book launch of "Chang Yu: Life and Complete Works of Oil Paintings"

Ms. Yi Shufan returns home

They talked about her life with Chang Yu.

The following is her own statement:

Special Editor: Huang Xirui

Editor: Deng Kailei

Self-narration: Yi Shufan

The scene of Chang Yu's last painting exhibition before his death

The first time I saw Chang Yu's work was in 1984, when I accompanied the boss of Sotheby's to an exhibition at the Taipei Museum of History and saw a Chang Yu hanging on the wall. I was very curious, so I asked the staff, "What is this?" He told me that this was a nude painting by the Chinese artist Chang Yu.

I see a resonance in Chang Yu's paintings. What he did was to blend together modern Western expressions and traditional Chinese elements. This fusion is not a simple "adding a little soy sauce to pasta" fusion, but is extremely artistic.

Because I received basic education in Taiwan and received higher education in Japan and the United States, I have always been exposed to a mixture of Western and Chinese culture, so my background is very similar.

Yi Shufan looks through her newly compiled book, Sanyu: Life and Complete Works of Oil Paintings (hereinafter referred to as Sanyu Complete Works), at her home in Taipei.

Sanyu and Robert Frank, Paris, 1964

I thought this artist was so interesting, but I couldn't find any specific information, so I was obsessed with researching him. I knew that he had a very good relationship with Robert Frank, a very famous American photographer, so I found an expert in Sotheby's photography department and asked him to introduce me to Robert.

He told me: "You line up, people all over the world want to meet Robert." So I wrote a letter to Robert's gallery, saying that I was studying Chang Yu and knew that Mr. Frank was a good friend of Chang Yu during his lifetime, and I really wanted to meet him and talk.

The extremely rare sculpture of Sanyu, Lady with Green Gloves, was collected by Robert Frank and was his favorite work of Sanyu during his lifetime.

I thought the matter was over so simply, and I even went on vacation to Paris with my husband, but then I received a call saying that Robert was willing to meet me.

I told my husband at the time, "I'm sorry, I have to go to New York." After arriving in New York, I talked with him for three days and three nights. For Robert, Chang Yu was a very important friend. Looking back, I have a lot of feelings.

Yi Shufan and Robert renovated Sanyu's tomb, 1998

We also went back to Paris to look for Sanyu's friends. Sanyu died in Paris, France in August 1966. His financial situation was very difficult at the time. He was penniless and could not afford a tombstone or a cemetery. He had no family. Only an Asian compatriot rented a cemetery for him at the cheapest price. Sanyu was buried under a cement slab for 30 years.

I don’t know if it was destined, but we found Chang Yu’s cemetery in September 1997, just in the grace period for the cemetery to expire. If it had been a few months later, we might have lost it. I originally thought of buying the cemetery directly, because it was not expensive, probably not much different from the renewal rent.

Yi Shufan and Sanyu's wife Marcel Harmonier from 1928 to 1931

Mademoiselle Harmonnier, daughter of a French baron, circa 1925

Harmonier in Sanyu's Paintings

But in the end, the lease was only renewed for another 30 years. Why? Because Robert said that if Chang Yu survived, someone would be found and renew the lease for him before 2026. I thought about it and felt that he was right - because life is like this, it is easy to buy things, but it is difficult to be remembered.

This year is only two years away from 2026. I will wait until the last minute to renew his lease. The reason for waiting is that I hope someone else will do the same thing. My research and writing on Chang Yu is just the beginning. The rest of the story may need to be continued by others.

A photo of Chang Yu and his second brother, circa 1918

In fact, when Chang Yu first arrived in France, he was very wealthy and did not have to worry about food, clothing or housing. His brother was called "Chang Baiwan" and he was a millionaire in the 1920s.

But unfortunately, his brother passed away in 1930. In 1929, the global economic crisis occurred and the entire stock market collapsed. So from the 1930s until Chang Yu's death, he was very poor. He couldn't sell his paintings, had no food to eat, and couldn't pay the rent.

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Yellow and Blue), 1954

Yi Shufan found that the color scheme of Sanyu's works in the 1950s/1960s was very similar to that of Rothko

Chang Yu, Blue Night Leopard, 1950s/1960s

But he is actually not a lazy person. This time we searched through databases containing information on Chang Yu in Paris, the Netherlands, the United States and Japan, and discovered a lot of things that were previously unknown to everyone.

For example, he would write articles in French newspapers, and even saved some money to go to New York and hold several exhibitions. Many of his works were similar to Rothko's style and color scheme at the time, and the exhibitions were well received. He also spared no effort to promote his table tennis, hoping to make a fortune through table tennis and improve his life.

Portrait of Chang Yu taken in Paris in 1921

Portraits of Chang Yu taken in Paris in the 1940s

Another interesting thing is that Chang Yu used to pretend to be young in the Paris art circle. I checked a lot of information and found that Chang Yu's birth year has been changing. Some said he was born between 1895 and 1907, but in the end I was sure that he was born in 1895 because the recommendation letter for his university said he was born in 1895.

It was not until the 1930s that he started saying that he was born in 1901. I guess it was because his good friends were helping him organize some exhibitions and said that he was a young Chinese artist. Generally, if you are in your 30s, you can still say you are young, but 40 is not right, so he changed his year of birth.

But his birthday is always written as October 14, the same as my birthday. Jiang Xun joked with me before: "How can it be such a coincidence? You like him so much and spent so much time studying him, and your birthdays are on the same day. You are really Sanyu's soul wife."

Yi Shufan's Liqing Foundation is filled with all kinds of information about Chang Yu.

Over the past 30 years, all the information on Chang Yu that I have collected is first-hand.

In 1999, I went to the Art Center of the University of Texas to look up information about Sanyu. Luo, a very important art dealer and writer who had represented Sanyu for three years, donated all of his diaries, notes, and materials on Sanyu to the University of Texas.

The latest collection of Sanyu's early ink paintings and calligraphy works

At that time, the materials could not be copied, so I copied them all by hand. Now that they have been digitized, we have found more materials, which are all written in the newly edited Sanyu Complete Works. For example, we have always heard that Sanyu went to Japan in 1917 and his ink paintings were published in a magazine, but we have never seen them.

Now we have finally found it. These are the three earliest ink paintings of Chang Yu that we have ever seen. When you see how good Chang Yu's ink paintings were when he was 20 years old, you will understand why he did this when he first arrived in Paris, using a line to outline the nude, because the foundation of his art comes from Chinese calligraphy.

When he was young, Chang Yu painted in ink and wash, and in his later years he returned to this style. When we examined his later paintings, we found that the typical yellow nude women and the black outlines were actually made of Chinese ink, which is why they look so smooth. Including many still life paintings, ink is used. The different dryness of the brush and the different amount of water will directly affect the artistic expression of the painting.

Let me describe it. It's like when you eat a particularly delicious dish that you have never eaten before, but it feels inexplicably familiar to you. It's not until someone tells you what familiar ingredients are used in it that you suddenly realize why it tastes so good.

Infrared light in "Nude with Pekingese Dog" clearly shows the dark patterns of Chang Yu's painting under the white bed sheet

There are also the hidden patterns that Chang Yu constructed beneath the surface of the painting, which are like the technique used in Chinese porcelain. They are a bit hazy and invisible, but you can vaguely see them. They represent the aesthetic taste of ancient literati for art. They are very low-key, yet highly artistic.

How did he do it? For example, in the white bed sheet of the naked woman, he first painted the flowers with varnish inside the white, and then applied a layer of white oil paint. When we use infrared light to illuminate it, we can see it very clearly.

When you peel off the layers of Chang Yu's paintings, you can see that he uses very Western techniques to blend traditional Chinese elements. The combination of two cultures, tradition and modernity, is quite touching and makes me want to know more about him.

Chang Yu, Two White Horses, 1930s

Chang Yu, Elephant in the Desert, 1965

Different animals in Chang Yu's early and late paintings

Each period of Chang Yu's paintings is different. For example, his animals in 1930, including horses, cats and dogs, are all very beautiful and cute.

But in the 1950s, the animals in his paintings had "changed", becoming a little lonely, a little depressed, a little panicked, and very lonely, which was also related to his situation in his later years.

Yi Shufan told us that the two volumes of "Chang Yu: Life and Complete Works of Oil Paintings" were printed by the best printing factory in Italy, in three languages. Only 2,000 copies were printed worldwide, and she has no plans to print more. She just wanted to fulfill her own wish.

What makes me very proud of this collection of Chang Yu's works is that I have annotated every new discovery clearly and clearly, and every sentence and every picture has its basis.

After I finished writing it, I looked at it and found that there were more than 800 annotations, which was too many. I was afraid that readers would have a headache reading it, so I ended up deleting and merging them, and now there are still more than 500 annotations.

Two Sanyu auctions led by Yi Shufan

Why did I resolutely choose to leave Sotheby’s? Because Robert’s words touched me deeply: “If you really love Changyu, you shouldn’t stay in the auction house.”

In the two Chang Yu special auctions that I led in 1995 and 1997, the prices of his works were earth-shattering. It seemed that it was the first time that a painting in Taiwan was worth over 10 million yuan.

The entire art world was shocked at the time. All the newspapers and magazines about art had headlines about Chang Yu everywhere on their front pages.

The reason I worked so hard to sort out Chang Yu's work is that after leaving Sotheby's, I noticed that Chang Yu often reported which paintings were sold for millions of Hong Kong dollars, tens of millions of Hong Kong dollars, or even hundreds of millions of Hong Kong dollars.

I started to feel that something was wrong. I thought if the market continued like this, it would be a bubble. When I compiled a complete collection of Chang Yu's works a few years ago, I felt that I had a heavy responsibility because major auction houses, art galleries and research institutions at home and abroad would use my collection as a reference. There are too many fake Chang Yu works on the market now!

Yi Shufan's foundation uses infrared light to photograph Sanyu's works

An article about Chang Yu was published in a small Dutch art magazine in the October 1946 issue.

So I was afraid of making mistakes and tried to be accurate. We even found a very short article about Chang Yu in a small Dutch art magazine, and we couldn't miss any clues.

And I hope to balance the market and Chang Yu's academic nature. I compiled his life story, hoping that he would become an artist that everyone is interested in knowing and who is valuable in art history.

The exhibition “Missing Paris” by Chang Yu in Taipei in 2017

In 2017, the Taipei Museum of History held a large retrospective of Chang Yu. At that time, my good friend Kevin Tsai and I were discussing Chang Yu. He said, "Do you believe that only about 1 out of 1,000 people knows Chang Yu?"

Of course I was very unconvinced. We were in Eslite Bookstore that day, and I was so stimulated by what he said that I rushed to ask people in the bookstore and passers-by, "Excuse me, do you know Chang Yu?" After asking more than a dozen people in a row and they all answered me "I don't know", I went back to him very frustrated and told him "It seems like you are right."

In the MV of "The Greatest Work", the actor plays Chang Yu in the studio

I also wrote in the introduction of this book that I have always liked Jay Chou and am his fan. In fact, Sanyu also appeared in the MV of his song "The Greatest Work", and I watched it carefully many times and found that Sanyu appeared the most, more than any other artist.

The MV had been out for less than a month, and it had already received more than 16 million hits on video sites. I told Kevin Tsai that I would be so happy if 1,600 people read my book. We only had the Italian printing house print 2,000 copies in total, and we had no plans to reprint them.

I'm not some old scholar. I think any method is fine. It's great that Jay Chou can release a song like this to let more people know about Chang Yu.

I can't sing or write songs, all I can do is write something interesting that I can write, so that people will be interested in Chang Yu as a person, instead of just knowing him as the "most expensive" artist. This way, I will not let down my research and love for Chang Yu for so many years.

Some pictures are courtesy of Liqing Foundation and Ms. Yi Shufan