Phillips de Pury & Company is pleased to announce the sale of the China Avant-Garde: The Farber Collection, the historic collection of contemporary Chinese art. The collection will be auctioned as part of Phillips de Pury & Company’s Contemporary Art evening sale in London on October 13, 2007 at 7 pm.China Avant-Garde: The Farber Collection is the most important collection of contemporary Chinese art to come to auction to date. The collection is composed of forty-four works of painting, photography, and sculpture from 1986 to the present by every major artist including Ai Weiwei, Cai Guoqiang, Chen Zhen, Fang Lijun, Geng Jianyi, Gu Wenda, Huang Yongping, Liu Wei, Wang Guangyi, Wang Qingsong, Yang Shaobin, Xu Bing, Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Peili, Zhang Xiaogang, and Zheng Guogu.At the heart of China Avant-Garde: The Farber Collection are iconic masterpieces central to the history of contemporary Chinese art that were acquired from major exhibitions or directly from the artist, and that have not appeared on the market since. The majority of works in this collection have been acquired directly from seminal exhibitions that broke new ground for contemporary Chinese art, including China/Avant-Garde at Beijing’s National Art Gallery (1989), I Don’t Want to Play Cards with Cezanne, the first exhibition of contemporary Chinese art in the United States (1990), and Inside Out: New Chinese Art at The Asia Society and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1998-1999). Many of the works have been reproduced in publications including the New York Times, The Art Newspaper, Karen Smith’s Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China, and Melissa Chiu’s Breakout: Chinese Art Outside China.