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Art: Chrysanthemums in a Glass Vase fetches $13.35M

A still life by Chinese-French painter Sanyu (Chang Yu, 1901-1966) fetched a whopping HK$103.58 million ($13.35 million) at a Hong Kong auction on Saturday night. Chrysanthemums in a Glass Vase was painted in the 1950s and a French family acquired the painting from the artist in 1965. Born into a wealthy family in Sichuan province, Sanyu went to France to study art in 1921 and had spent the rest of his life in Paris. Flowers were a frequent motif of Sanyu's oil paintings, in which he explored the harmony of color, space and light and successfully presented the graceful simplicity of Eastern aesthetics.