Walasse Ting was a wanderer between two cultures who delighted a wide audience with his fusion of Eastern and Western art. Characteristic motifs for the Chinese artist include female nudes, cats and birds, which he painted in bright acrylic colours on rice paper.
(...) Continue readingWalasse Ting - His artistic beginnings lay in street art
Walasse Ting was born on 13th October 1929 in the county-free city of Wuxi in the Chinese province of Jiangsu, but spent his childhood in Shanghai, 125 kilometres away. According to Chinese tradition, a child's first name reflects the qualities his parents wish him to have, which is why Walasse Ting was given the name Hsiung Chuen, meaning 'powerful and overflowing spring'. In fact, inspiration was already bubbling in Walasse Ting's earliest youth; he painted and drew, not only on paper, but preferably on the pavements of Shanghai, which he decorated with chalk pictures. Although he briefly attended the Shanghai Art Academy, he realised after just a few lessons that academic teaching had nothing to offer him. The passionate street artist therefore remained self-taught when he left China in 1946 to move to Hong Kong, which was still a British crown colony at the time and was considered a foreign country. After exhibiting some of his works there and even selling several watercolours to American art collectors, he moved on to Paris in 1952 full of confidence.
Equal exchange between East and West
Walasse Ting quickly found access to artistic circles in Paris, but did not wish to join any particular movement. He became particularly close to the Belgian painter Pierre Alechinsky, a member of the transnational avant-garde artists' group CoBrA, who was very interested in the Chinese painting techniques used by Ting and had himself taught how to use them. Walasse Ting saw himself as a modern Chinese painter in Paris; he had not come as a student, but as a fully-fledged artist who wanted to work with other artists on an equal footing in order to connect Eastern and Western trends. He sought an equal exchange, not one-sided instruction: while he taught Alechinsky calligraphy, he himself tried his hand at oil painting, with which he was still unfamiliar. In addition to the Belgian, Walasse Ting's friends also included the Dutch painter Karel Appel and the Danish artist Asger Jorn. After many successes in Paris, the artist moved on to New York in 1957.
International success with colourful paintings
In New York, Walasse Ting was initially inspired by the prevailing Abstract Expressionism, but under the influence of the emerging Pop Art movement, finally found the style that made him world-famous: figurative depictions of naked women, horses, birds and cats in bold, bright, fluorescent colours. He celebrated great success with this style of painting in Europe and the USA in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s; in 1970 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to his visual art, Walasse Ting was also active as a poet and published 13 books, which often contained lyrical texts to accompany his paintings. In 1974 he was granted American citizenship and in 1975 took up a professorship at the venerable Harvard University. In 1986, he opened a studio in Amsterdam and since then has worked alternately there and in New York. In 2002, the artist suffered a brain haemorrhage, which prevented him from engaging in any artistic activity for the rest of his life.
Walasse Ting died on 17th May 2010 in New York.
Walasse Ting - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
