Hi
I think the spirits of the M-IPB world must be having a party up there at the great Hengshui Studio in the sky
Having posted what I did below, saying that what purported to be " Yi Ding 一 丁" was in fact signed " Xiao Ding "
(Chinese character image Little Ding ) as far as I could see from the ebay website pic , to day I met a REAL Xiao Ding ( = Little Ding)
(Chinese character image Little Ding)!
NO JOKE !I had heard that this months's artist-of-the-month at CAC Star House was a pupil of Fu Guoshun called Ding Xing Biao
(Chinese character image Ding Xing Biao ) whose name appeared no-where at all on my DB . His pen name is Bai Shi
Chinese characters image Bai Shi , which also is no-where in my DB ( so much for my DB ! )
I went to meet him today . He's a youngish-looking and very handsome, well-spoken guy, born 1972, so 39 years old. Amazing that his name has never come up before in any books or journals that I have seen. He had brought a lot of well-painted bottles in many different styles which are not my collecting themes, and many bottles in natural crystal
with inclusions , which of course immediately puts the price up by min. US$ 1K , because that what these type of raw bottles cost to buy. I had almost given up seeing any bottle I could be interested in when I spotted a really lovely Chinese landscape in just simple black/ white with a trace of red. Beautiful ! And the longer I looked at it the more I admired it . Fortunately it was in man-made crystal so the price was quite OK ( less than US$ 1K) , in fact very cheap considering the quality of the painting and that Ding Xingbiao would only get a proportion of what I paid after CAC's commission.
When I got home I looked in even more detail, and there on one side - to my astonishment - it was signed
"Xiao Ding' ! The other side was signed Bai Shi.
So here is the REAL Xiao Ding, but certainly not the Xiao Ding on ebay . Ding Xingbiao's work in a totally different league - and price category ( I am talking US$ thousands for his prime bottles)
Cheers Peter