Untitled (Fishes)

Walasse Ting, or “the great flower thief” as he often called himself, was a frontrunner among international Chinese artists who reached his heyday after his move to New York in the 1960s. Prior to his days of glory, Ting left his hometown in Shanghai to work in Hong Kong, and then to Paris in the 1950s. He resided in Paris for six years, during which he not only struggled to establish himself as an artist but also to financially support himself. Fortunately, Ting met Pierre Alechinsky, a Belgian Abstract Expressionist artist who invited him to join the avant-garde artist group CoBrA (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam). With his extensive network, he gathered prints from celebrity artists such as Andy Warhol, Asger Jorn and Sam Francis to publish his renowned poetry collection One Cent Life. At the time, Ting was heavily influenced by Abstract Expressionism, and so he began to paint with bold dripping strokes that recall the action painting of Abstract Expressionist artist Jackson Pollock. Beginning in the 1970s, Ting developed his own signature style that reflected his passion as well as his roots. Unlike his contemporaries who strived to incorporate Eastern political and social elements associated with the post-war transformations, Ting included motifs such as flowers, females and fish that stemmed from his personal desires. Using Chinese calligraphic brushstrokes and vivid, fluorescent hues of color, Ting successfully created erotic yet aesthetically captivating works. As a peripatetic artist, his oeuvre exhibits an amalgamation of the Eastern spirit in traditional Chinese art with hints of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, as well as Neo-Figurativism.