Wei Tian Lin

Public documentation of Wei Tian Lin's life is thin. Auction and price-database sources consistently give a birth year of 1898 and a death year of 1977, but no source available for this profile supplies an exact birth date, death date, or birthplace. Christie's Hong Kong has catalogued his painting Old tree, an oil on canvas, listing the artist as "Wei Tianlin (1898 to 1977)." Other auction lots attributed to the same painter include titles such as White Peonies, Red Peonies, and a work translated as Classical statue in the flowers, suggesting a practice built around still life, garden subjects, and landscape motifs, though this reading is drawn from lot titles rather than from a documented artist statement or critical essay.

The artist's name appears across sources in several forms: Wei Tianlin (the most common auction-database spelling), Tianlin Wei (Western given-name-first order used by Invaluable), Wei Tian Lin (the spaced form used by Artnet), and the Chinese characters 卫天霖. These refer to the same painter and should not be confused with other, unrelated artists who share partial name overlap, including a contemporary artist known as Tian Wei who is represented by October Gallery in London and is a separate person with a separate market.

No documented education, no current gallery or estate representation, and no museum collection holding a work by this artist could be confirmed as of this profile's research date.

No exhibition history, award, or dated critical essay in a major art publication could be confirmed for this artist as of this profile's research date. No verbatim critic quotation meeting sourcing standards was located. The absence of coverage should be read as a gap in available documentation rather than as evidence about the quality or significance of the work.

Public price data for this artist is fragmented and does not reconcile across sources. Christie's Hong Kong has catalogued a painting titled Old tree by Wei Tianlin (1898 to 1977), and separate Christie's lot listings under the same artist name show realized prices of roughly HKD 576,000 and HKD 7,064,000, but available sources do not confirm which of these prices, if any, corresponds to Old tree or to a specific sale date. MutualArt reports realized prices up to USD 775,177 for paintings and USD 75,715 for works on paper. Other price aggregators, including FindArtInfo, also track this artist, but their figures could not be tied to a specific work, sale date, and auction house in the sources reviewed for this profile. As a result, no single confirmed auction record is reported here.

This is a thinly documented market and the name itself is a source of risk: Wei Tianlin, Tianlin Wei, and Wei Tian Lin are the same painter, but a contemporary and unrelated artist, Tian Wei, uses a similar name and has an active gallery market, so name-matching alone is not sufficient due diligence. There is no catalogue raisonne and no confirmed gallery or estate to consult for authentication, which puts the weight of verification on the auction house's own cataloguing at the time of sale. Price figures reported by different aggregators for this artist vary by an order of magnitude and could not be reconciled from public sources, so any reported "auction record" for this artist should be independently confirmed against a named work, sale date, and auction house before being relied upon.