“Where can I find a book as exciting as Times Square, colour as bright as neon light, hot as espresso [… and] one of the boldest international and collective editorial enterprises for bibliophiles.”

Pierre Alechinsky

After six years in Paris with the European Avant Garde including artists from the CoBrA movement, Walasse Ting moved to New York. His first and most influential connection there was with the abstract expressionist, Sam Francis. Like Pierre Alechinsky, the two became lifelong friends.

Walessa Ting wanted to publish a book, a revolutionary, affordable, and collaborative art portfolio that would illustrate his own poems and capture the zeitgeist of an era.
Francis agreed to help. He and Alechinsky would be joint editors, while he alone would finance the seventeen tons of white paper needed for production.

One Cent Life hit the streets in 1964 – two years after Ting and Francis met. A landmark publication for its time, it presented a virtual catalogue of the most important and divergent artists of the day, with 62 colourful loose-leaf lithographs representing the widest range of styles from Tachisme and Neo-Dadaism, through CoBrA and all forms of abstraction to Pop Art. It was printed in Paris, published in Bern, in an edition of 2,100 copies (100 of which were signed). It was an instant sensation, embraced by the art world on both sides of the Atlantic, and stands then as now as an ode to the joyful collective dream of the 1960s.

Walasse Ting published 13 books in his lifetime, but none documented the seismic shift that shook the art world – at a time when American abstract expressionism was being swept away by the unstoppable tsunami of pop art – as effectively as 1¢ Life.

A lust for life that is both uninhibited and magical.

Throughout his life and career, Walasse Ting maintained an abiding devotion to Matisse, evident early on in his chosen Western name – Walasse – a phonetic homage to the Fauvist master. There styles have much in common: an adherence to aesthetic harmony rather than strict realism, a preference for flat surfaces and decorative backgrounds, an emphasis on bright flora, birds and cats, explosive
use of pure, unmixed colours, concise, flowing lines, and lack of shading, depth and volume are all attributable to Matisse.

It was Matisse’s approach to the female subject that he most admired, however; and We Three Butterflies from 1977 with its bold, non-naturalistic colour, fluid
arabesque lines, and simplified abstraction, is a perfect example of this. Here, the female form appears as a cut-out, as much a decorative pattern as an emotional expression.

Admittedly, Walasse Ting, always the synthesizer, paints a flat background that owes as much to Pop as it does to Matisse. Hastily added splashes and daubs of colour highlight the figures within a frame of flowers and leaves, adding both space and unity. Yet, for all its effects, the spatial dimension created by the dripping paint is of less interest than the decorative dimension it provides. With his roots firmly planted in Eastern symbolism, Walasse Ting intuitively recognises women and flowers as deeply emotional subjects. The addition of flowers, unrefined and
gestural, emphasizes the subject’s femininity, while reflecting the artist’s own joy in painting it and that of the viewer standing before it.

Finally, the presence of a cat curled up by their side evokes ideas of domesticity, symbolizing grace and independence, as well as an enigmatic connection to nature.
And butterflies, long considered living symbols of freedom, transient beauty, and free love in Chinese art and poetry, represent the sensual joy of nature and simply enjoying the moment before it fades.

He loves splashes of color for they are flowers in reality.
He paints, fluidly, and then nothing else exists but the flowers
which are, in reality, splashes.

Pierre Alechinsky

By the late 1960s, Walasse Ting’s style had evolved towards the figurative
– his preferred subject, the female figure in varying degrees of dress. By the 1970s, Walasse Ting’s eclectic style was in place, his preferred technique, a blend of Chinese calligraphic brushstrokes with spontaneously dripping, splashing or flowing paint in a vibrant array of fluorescent colours.

Traditional Chinese ink, a staple of his production, was supplemented by commercial acrylic paint, a medium he quickly mastered after many years of collaboration with his friend Pierre Alechinsky in Paris and later in New York. Other friendships, with the likes of Sam Francis and the pop artist Tom Wesselmann, whose famous series of nudes directly inspired him, led Walasse Ting to embrace vivid explorations of colour and light, driving him to revive the classical nude to reveal unbridled joy, sensuality and emotional liberation in a style and subject matter that was all his own.By the 1980s, a spacious studio yielded larger and larger works, and Walasse Ting’s figurative canvases grew.

Incorporating all these techniques and sensibilities, “I Sleep in the Garden” captures the artist’s fantasy of an odalisque, Anno 1985, in a tribute to feminine beauty, nature and the “joie de vivre,” that epitomizes his hedonistic
ideals. The figure’s serpentine line immediately recalls the works of Matisse and his many seductive and colourful depictions of this classic motif. The painting was executed horizontally, painted on the flat surface of the floor, and only after capturing the dynamic figure of the reclining woman did Walasse Ting let cascades of acrylic paint splash down like rain to cover the contours of the figure’s serpentine beauty and immerse her in a vibrant bed of flowers – the Eastern symbol of beauty and femininity itself.

As a rule, Ting’s ladies, although not portraits per se, possess genuine character and are endowed with individual traits and personality. Executed quickly and
spontaneously, they are often surrounded by objects found in nature, flowers and foliage. He rarely depicts his women indoors, choosing instead to paint them either
in abstract environments or embraced by nature in all its sensual splendor. Like the two models seen here, enveloped in a cascade of bright, fluorescent colors with
images of flowers and leaves. Through spontaneous, emotional explosions of color – drips and splashes of pigment over brushstrokes – their femininity is seen to merge with the colors, textures and content of their surroundings. A blend of mystery, sensuality and Eastern fantasy. They could be sisters. Or courtesans, taken from
the lines of an eighth-century verse ...

Ever since his early upbringing in Shanghai, Walasse Ting has constantly drawn on a wide range of experiences to create his own style, where East meets West, figurative
art meets abstraction, words meet canvas. He had a great love for classical Chinese literature and was deeply influenced by 8th-century poetry, especially by Tang Dynasty poets such as Yuan Shen and Li Bai. As an artist, he was as prolific in his ink washes on paper as he was in covering large canvases with colorful acrylic paint. His poetry, if not in terms of output, then at least in the raw expression of life as it is lived, rivaled his painterly creations; he managed to publish 13 books that combined his poetic talents with brilliant works of art.

Despite the title, there are two silent though colourful subjects in Beautiful Girl as Flower. Two women with downcast eyes, shielding their faces from our presence.
One, a blue-haired beauty, peeks out from behind red and pink peonies – a florid symbol of female beauty, and love, but also wealth, status, and prosperity. The other, her fair-haired friend, holds a simple bouquet of golden and yellow chrysanthemums, an expression of optimism, joy, and friendship on the one hand, but equally on the other a sign of scorned love – perhaps an ode to one of the most beloved poems from the Tang Dynasty, which in its closing line laments the fate of the chrysanthemum as “the last flower after which none will bloom”.

SOCIAL MEDIA