Walasse Ting

Untitled, 1985

Charcoal on arches paper

17 1/2 x 13 inches

Courtesy of the Walasse Ting Estate and Alisan Fine Arts

Selected by Anna Lee

Born in Wuxi, Jiangsu in 1928, Walasse Ting is a Chinese diaspora artist celebrated for his colourful and bright depictions of animals, flora and sultry women. He briefly studied at the Shanghai  College of Fine Arts in the 1940s, before leaving for Paris in 1953 in his early 20s. There he became associated with artists belonging to the avant-garde group CoBrA.

In 1957, he travelled to New York, where he befriended the American artist Sam Francis; here Ting became strongly influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. In 1964 he wrote One Cent Life, edited by Francis and published by E.W. Kornfeld, which involved collaborating with twenty-eight European and American Pop Art and Expressionist artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Joan Mitchell, and included sixty-two original lithographs. In 1977, he won the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for his drawings. His paintings during this period are filled with bold dripping brush strokes mixed with bright acrylic pigments, but by the 1970s, he began experimenting with figures, developing the distinctive style that we are so familiar with today. His paintings are a sheer testimony to love, life and beauty. His paintings of women, flowers, cats, fish, horses, and watermelons are often painted in a rich palette of bright acrylics on rice paper, layered with powerful effervescent brushstrokes in Chinese ink. He passed away in 2010.

His works have been collected by numerous important museums around the world including Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Chicago Institute of Art; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Tate Gallery, London; Musée Cernuschi, Paris; Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; Taipei Fine Art Museum, Taiwan; Hong Kong Museum of Art; M+, Hong Kong, to name a few.