Hei Bolong

According to an auction house biography published by the SoWAs group, Hei Bolong was born Hei Yuanji in Linqing, Shandong Province, China, and was of Hui ethnicity. The same source states that he trained in the Chinese Painting Department of Shanghai Art College, though it does not give exact years of attendance or graduation. No independent museum, press, or archival source was located to corroborate these details, so they should be treated as single-sourced.

Market databases disagree on his birth year: Artprice lists his life dates as 1915 to 1989, while MutualArt lists 1914 to 1989. The death year is consistent across both sources, but the birth year is not, and no exact death date, place of death, or independent obituary could be located.

Market records distinguish Hei Bolong from other artists with similar or overlapping names, including the contemporary painter Li Hei Di, who set an auction record at Sotheby's Hong Kong, and the separately catalogued artist Yan Bolong, recorded by Heritage Auctions. Auction databases treat "Hei Bolong," "HEI Bolong," and the AskART variant "Bolong He" as the same market identity, with no evidence of multiple distinct artists sharing this name.

No exhibition history, awards, honors, or verbatim critical commentary from named critics in major outlets could be located for this artist. The absence of such coverage is itself a documented feature of the current public record, not an editorial judgment on the work's merit.

Public auction data for Hei Bolong is thin and inconsistently reported. MutualArt's aggregated auction history lists roughly fifty two works by the artist and reports realized prices reaching as high as USD 375,655 for works on paper and USD 15,965 for paintings; the same source separately flags a 1973 work titled Scholar as having sold about 405 percent above its mid-estimate. None of these figures is tied to a specific auction house, sale date, or currency of sale in the available record, and none has been corroborated by a second market database, so they should be treated as provisional rather than a confirmed auction record. Artprice separately reports about 302 lots offered at public auction under the name HEI Bolong, a count that also rests on a single source. No gallery or estate is documented as currently representing the artist; his work is known to circulate through auction platforms such as SoWAs.

Any interest in Hei Bolong should begin with identity verification. Auction platforms use several name orderings and spellings for this artist, and the name is close enough to other artists' names that misattribution is a real risk. Several biographical details, including birthplace, ethnicity, and education, come from a single auction house biography and have not been corroborated elsewhere, so they should be verified independently before being relied upon. There is no catalogue raisonne and no identified foundation or estate to authenticate works, which means provenance and auction house documentation carry unusually heavy weight in any transaction involving this artist.