Hi Pat,
Nei Lei is an intruiging artist. I have 3 categories of bottles painted by him : all so totally different that I have difficulty to believe they are all by the same artist.
1. Persian cats ( + mouse) - superb painting
2. A series of so-so landscapes, all very similar in style, that he ( ? ) painted about 2 years ago in one session , and most of which I bought up at the time
3. 2 x superb calligraphy bottles
I bought all the bottles at Ms Wang's shop in SH .
I met Nei Lei last time I was in Hengshui in 4.2010 when I went to his shop . There were a lot of bottles on his shelves, including some by other medium-level HS artists complete with a picture of the artist and his background bio-data. Most of them were very uninteresting for me except a couple of landscapes which I photographed in detail . One was a poor knock-off of another landscape bottle I have by another artist. And the other was a direct ( but bad) knock -off of Sun Honglin's unique style / theme , and to my shock, when I just retrieved the pic, I found it was signed " Rui Zhi" ! I had to do a double-take on it to make sure my eyes were not playing tricks. But the signature is very VERY clearly Rui Zhi . See pics attached
So what do we make of all this ? Not sure.
Is Nei Lei some sort of bottle dealer / middle-man who takes in un-signed stuff, signs Rui Zhi and then passes the bottles on to the open market ? Meanwhile he does his own calligraphy bottles under the name Yi Ding (and /or Rui Zhi) ? When I visited him in 4.2010 he showed me what he said was his
last remaining calligraphy bottle which was " not for sale" . But then I later in 2010 bought my two "1,000 character " calligraphy bottles by him , signed Yi Ding, in SH at Ms Wang's shop for about US$800 each . If they were in fact not by Nei Lei, they were certainly painted by someone with huge skill.
So I am really puzzled
Hope I attached the correct pics to this email
Cheers Peter
