Chunxiang Zhao

Chunxiang Zhao, 趙春翔, painted in ink, acrylic, and mixed media on paper, often mounted on canvas, with titles frequently referencing birds and natural forms, among them Bamboo and Bird and a serigraph titled Chinese Bird. Major auction houses, including Christie's and Sotheby's, catalogue him under the name Chao Chung-hsiang (Zhao Chunxiang), treating this as one artist rather than two.

Sources disagree on his exact birth year. Most auction-market references, including Artprice, Invaluable, Christie's, and Sotheby's, give 1910, while the Art Institute of Chicago's collection record gives 1913. He died in 1991; no source located in current research gives an exact death date or place, and no obituary or gallery statement supplying those details has been found. One commercial listing describes him as Taiwanese rather than Chinese, which may reflect time spent in Taiwan, but this has not been separately confirmed.

No school, degree, or year of formal art training could be documented for him in available sources. Several living people share similar names, including a finance and economics student in Singapore and a chemistry lecturer in China, and none of their biographies apply to this artist. Likewise, no gallery or estate currently representing his work could be confirmed as of this writing; his market presence today runs almost entirely through auction house sales rather than gallery representation.

The one confirmed museum holding is at the Art Institute of Chicago, which lists a work titled Black Splash 6 under the name Zhao Chunxiang with the alternate name Chao Chung Hsiang; a specific date for the work could not be confirmed from current research.

No verbatim critic commentary from named writers in major art press outlets could be located and verified for this artist in current research; claiming otherwise would not be supportable. What can be said is that his work is treated as a recognized, if lightly documented, category within Chinese modern ink and mixed-media painting by the specialist departments at Christie's and Sotheby's, both of which have handled and catalogued his paintings in Asian art sales.

The best-documented auction result for this artist is Bamboo and Bird, which sold at Christie's Hong Kong on 27 May 2007 for HKD 295,500, approximately USD 37,900 at the time using standard currency conversion. No higher realized price could be confirmed as of 2026-07-10 across the auction and dealer databases reviewed, including Artsy, Invaluable, and LiveAuctioneers.

His works have also appeared at Sotheby's, including a piece titled Five Phases, offered in a 2016 Hong Kong evening sale. No confirmed realized price, work date, or estimate for that lot could be located in current research, so it is noted here only as context and not as a record sale. Overall, public auction data for this artist is thin and fragmented across the different romanizations of his name, which likely understates his true sale history and makes any single reported price less reliable as an indicator of broader demand.

Before acquiring any work attributed to this artist, collectors should confirm which romanization and spelling variant a given seller is using, since Chao Chung-hsiang and Zhao Chunxiang, along with Chun-Hsiang Chao, all refer to the same person in the market. There is no catalogue raisonne, and public auction history is sparse and split across those name variants, which makes price benchmarking harder than it would be for a more consistently catalogued artist. Given the disputed birth year and the absence of any confirmed exact death date or place, provenance research and attribution should rely on the specialist departments of major auction houses rather than on any single online reference, including this one.