Walasse Ting

WALASSE TING (Shanghai, China, 1929 - New York, USA, 2010).
"Ladies with parrots".
Mixed media on paper.
Signed.
With label on the back of Sala Nonell, Barcelona.
Measurements: 45 x 58 cm; 75 x 89 cm (frame).

The Chinese-American artist Walasse Ting deeply appreciated the female form, and associated the feminine soul with birds and flowers as they share delicacy and mysterious beauty. His style, influenced by Chinese calligraphy, the CoBrA group and abstract expressionism, was characterized by the use of vivid, often fluorescent colors, as seen in this unique painting. This work is an outstanding example of his mature style, which earned him the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Drawing in 1970. Ting combines a colorful language, characterized by the dialogue between the stroke and the colored stain, with a decorative vision that is rooted in the Chinese pictorial tradition, avoiding the spatial representation of European stylistic patterns. The stroke of the representation shows a line of expressive and meditated character, which is based on different aspects and shades based on traditional Chinese ink painting. However, the treatment of color through large fields compose a personal, erotic and contemporary image, influenced by the avant-garde of expressionist tendency.

Chinese artist and poet Ting studied briefly at the Shanghai Art Academy before leaving China in 1946 to move to Hong Kong, where he exhibited some of his watercolors in a local bookstore. In 1950, he traveled to France and eventually arrived in Paris without money, friends or accommodation. He lived as a bohemian artist for six years, absorbing the artistic styles of the city and exhibiting for the first time pieces in which he introduced characteristics of Western art, based especially on the expressionist movement and the works of Picasso. In 1958 Ting arrived in New York, coinciding with the beginning of a period of apogee for the Abstract Expressionist movement. Unlike in Paris, his work achieved remarkable artistic recognition. His paintings at that time were mainly poetic abstractions influenced by the aesthetic patterns of traditional Chinese artists. It was from the 1970s onward that Ting developed his most distinctive style using Chinese calligraphic brushstrokes to define contours and fill in flat areas of color with brightly colored acrylic paint. After more than 20 years in New York, Ting moved to Amsterdam, where he owned a large studio, where he worked until 2002, when he suffered a serious illness that retired him from the art world, and in 1970 he was awarded the Guggenheim Prize for his drawings. His works are currently represented in important art centers 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.