"Flower-Vase on Iron Stove, no. 4” (2001) by Chinese Contemporary artist Li Song is a sublime example of his critically acclaimed ability to successfully capture the cycle of life in the organic as well as inorganic in his realist oil paintings. Li has loaded this quiet still-life with an exciting range of colors and textures, with a visual focus on the many white-petaled flowers in full bloom placed in a square, glass vase filled with water that rest atop an iron stove. The unabashed beauty of the flowers, as well as their delicacy and ephemeral nature, underscores the quiet tenor of the rest of scene. Art critic Yang Wei has stated: “Li Song [is able to] to bypass the College of formality,… and yet retain the Classical Realist technique to resurrect the contemporary art scene.” This painting is unframed and in excellent condition.

Li Song was born in 1965 the city of Mu Ling in China’s northern most province Helongjiang and in 1981 moved to Harbin to study painting. This region of China has much Russian influence and was far removed from the Contemporary art scene starting to explode in Beijing at the time. In 1993, Li Song moved to Beijing where he utilized his mastery of the European Classical Realist style to create intimate portraits of singular, disconnected objects and tableaux such as the present lot. Li Song is widely collected internationally, with notable Museum and gallery exhibits: "Brick", Yan Huang Museum, Beijing, April 2004; "Body Warmth: Hans Christian Andersen's 200th Anniversary", China Contemporary Exhibition, 2005; The Art Museum of the China Millennium, Beijing; and North Jutland Museum of Art, Aalborg, Denmark amongst many others. The artist lives and works in Beijing.