Figures Album, a collection of eight paintings by the late Chinese master Huang Zhou (1925-1997), broke the record for the highest price paid for a Chinese painting or work of calligraphy when it sold for RMB 7.245 million at the 2012 China Guardian Quarterly Auction.
　　Huang was not only a master of traditional Chinese painting, but also famous for his extensive art collection. He combined Western sketching skills with traditional Chinese painting to capture the movements of people and animals. The album was a long-term project, taking him five years to complete. The paintings depict a shepherd boy, a woman horse trainer, an elegant Korean dancer, and two other figures.
　　Huang produced the album in the 1970s during the heyday of his artistic career. He created the work as a tribute to his close friend Ou Chu, another well-known art collector who shared Huang’s tastes. Their friendship is well known and often discussed.
　　In these works, Huang used a bold, unrestrained style to depict such images as a cheerful shepherd boy, a fearless woman horse trainer and an elegant Korean dancer. Using simple but wellbalanced colors, textures and shapes, he managed to reveal the inner world of his subjects in a variety of scenes.
　　Huang’s interest in painting began during his childhood in a small village in Lixian County, Hebei Province, where he was born into a farmer’s family. In order to learn painting, he dropped out of junior middle school and moved to Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi Province. In 1943 he studied under famous traditional Chinese painter Zhao Wangyun (1906-1977), founder of the Chang’an school of painting. In 1949, he joined the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in which he was engaged in artwork. He often went to Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang in Northwest China to sketch from life. These experiences influenced the subject matter of his artwork. His paintings focus on ethnic minorities and ordinary people and portray harmony between humans and nature.
　　In 1953, Huang Zhou was transferred to Beijing. Huang was by then highly adept at figure and animal paintings, and his artistic creativity reached a peak during the next two decades. His painting Moving Forward in Snowy Wind won the Golden Medal at the Sixth World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957. Many other well-known works, such as Harvest and Soldiers on a Plateau, were also produced in this period.
　　In the late 1970s he became seriously ill and hospital-bound, but continued to express his creativity, even in hospital. A number of his works, such as Pine and Eagle and Donkeys, were presented as national gifts to foreign leaders. His career reached a second peak from the late 1970s to 1985, during which he produced paintings including Jubilant Grassland and Herding Horses.
　　In the 1980s, Huang held oneman shows in a number of countries and regions such as Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Britain and Germany. Besides creating paintings, he masterminded the building of the China National Arts & Crafts Museum, the Research Institute of Traditional Chinese Paintings, and the Yanhuang Art Gallery. He also served as vice president of the Research Institute of Traditional Chinese Paintings and curator of the Yanhuang Art Gallery. Huang did much to promote the development of Chinese art, including donating many of his own works and cultural relics and presiding over several important artistic seminars.
　　“All of my paintings come from life,” Huang, who believed that art is the expression of emotion, once said. “An artist should rely on effort rather than innate ability. If removed from life, the artist will lose his passion, and the painting will lose its color.”
　　Huang Zhou adopted both the expressive style of traditional Chinese painting and the more accurate style of Western traditions in artistic creation. His combination of freehand brushwork painting and traditional Chinese realism pushed forward the development of Chinese painting and created a new style. Huang Zhou particularly liked to depict the life of ethnic minorities in northwest China, and was one of few modern Chinese painters able to so portray their lives in such vivid detail.