Walasse Ting

WALASSE TING (Shanghai, China, 1929 – New York, U.S., 2010).
“Three Geishas with a Red Horse,” 1981.
Lithograph, A.P. edition.
Signed, dated, and inscribed by hand.
Measurements: 45 x 60 cm.

In this lithograph, Ting combines a colorful style—characterized by the interplay between line and color—with a naturalistic vision that draws on the Chinese pictorial tradition, eschewing the spatial representation typical of European stylistic conventions.

Ting, a Chinese artist and poet, studied briefly at the Shanghai Academy of Art before leaving China in 1946 to move to Hong Kong, where he exhibited some of his watercolors at a local bookstore. In 1950, he traveled to France and eventually arrived in Paris with no money, friends, or place to stay. He lived as a bohemian artist for six years, absorbing the city’s artistic styles and exhibiting for the first time works in which he incorporated elements of Western art, drawing particularly on the Expressionist movement and the works of Picasso. In 1958, Ting arrived in New York just as the Abstract Expressionist movement was reaching its peak. Unlike in Paris, his work gained significant artistic recognition. At that time, his paintings were primarily poetic abstractions influenced by the aesthetic patterns of traditional Chinese artists. It was in the 1970s that Ting developed his most distinctive style, using Chinese calligraphic brushstrokes to define contours and fill flat areas of color with vividly colored acrylic paint. After more than 20 years in New York, Ting moved to Amsterdam, where he had a spacious studio in which he continued to work until 2002, when he suffered a serious illness that forced him to withdraw from the art world. In 1970, he received the Guggenheim Fellowship for his drawings. Today, his works are represented in major art institutions such as the Tate Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, and other collections around the world.