A life in full
“His life would make such an incredible movie,” states Walasse Ting’s son, Jesse, during a recent interview with Essential Algarve.
He is not wrong. It is certainly true that his father led a remarkable, almost cinematic life, full of adventure and artistic exploration.
Walasse Ting was a prolific artist and poet who left the secure yet repressive regime of his native China in 1952 to live at first in Paris, where he made the acquaintance of many of the members of the CoBrA movement, such as Karel Appel, Pierre Alechinsky and Asger Jorn.
He later moved to New York, where he met his wife, started a family, and became friends with the leading lights of the Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art movements, such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Joan Mitchell.
After his wife’s untimely passing, he returned to Europe, settling finally in Amsterdam. Ting was much like Diogenes, the ‘cynic philosopher’, “a citizen of the world”.
As he traversed the globe, he absorbed modern European and American culture and incorporated it within traditional Chinese painting techniques and ancient practices.
This resulted in his distinctive gestural and calligraphic style. His paintings of women, flowers, cats, fish, horses and grasshoppers are vivid and exuberant, confident and quick brushstrokes of Chinese ink, layered with a palette of almost neon bright acrylics on rice paper.
“Paintings are my honey, colours are my flowers, velocity is what’s required of a thief – he must paint as speedily as he draws a gun,” he said once.
Born Ding Xiong Quan in1928, in Wuxi, China into a wealthy family, though largely self-taught, Ting briefly attended the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts. But it was on the streets that he honed his draughtsmanship skills and, despite the incentives to stay, in 1946 he left mainland China first for British-controlled Hong Kong and then to Paris, France.
At the Louvre Museum, Ting saw the great masterpieces of European art and fully engaged with the Modernist movements of the early 20th century; the painting tempo and the joie de vivre of the Impressionists. He appreciated Cezanne’s shifting picture plane, admired Gauguin’s male gaze which delighted in the sensual and seductive, and was startled by the pure colour of the Fauves.
For a young Ting, the works of Matisse and Derain were enthralling.
Whilst in Europe, Ting gravitated towards the contemporary CoBra art movement, with their four founding principles closely adhering to his personal philosophy: “Creation before theory; art must have roots; materialism which begins with the material; the mark as a sign of wellbeing, spontaneity, experimentation”.
Five years later, Ting moved to New York and once again was exposed to new and exciting art movements – Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.
It was here that Ting developed his mature style, and began gaining recognition.
Still, in many ways, he felt an outsider.
“He enjoyed acknowledgements, he was not exactly stateless, but he never had backing from any governments,” says Jesse Ting.
“US museums and art institutions were pushing out awards to American artists, who were white or were born there. So, he was passed over in many of these things. He did receive a Guggenheim fellowship. But these accolades were disproportionally low considering his success at the time.”
He is the author of multiple books, including One Cent Life, published in 1964 by E.W. Kornfeld and edited by his friend Sam Francis. The book was a collection of 62 original lithographs by 28 European and American Pop Art and Expressionist artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Joan Mitchell.
In certain ways, Ting embodied the Pop aesthetic with a love of consumerism and a flamboyant fashion sense. He enjoyed shopping and dining with Warhol but never became a New York celebrity.
When China opened up to visitors in 1979, Ting returned with his family for a visit and was shocked to see how undeveloped the country was, as Jesse recalls: “When we first went there it was almost like North Korea, with all the uniforms on the streets and everything in a bad state… It was a big deal for my father who hadn’t been able to see his family since he had left. His mother had passed away and he wasn’t allowed to travel to attend the funeral.”
Walasse Ting was not a dissent Chinese artist, in the way Ai Weiwei is considered today, but Chinese censors saw his work as Western perversion. His poetry was therefore written English and was considered quite bawdy. Later, when things were a bit more open, he wrote in his native Chinese as well as French.
Ting left New York for Amsterdam in the early 90’s and settled back into European life.
“It was a good time. The money was rolling in. He loved the flowers here. He very quickly got a Dutch girlfriend. He ended up buying a former school building and converted it into a studio. There were almost 1,000 florescent lights there; brightness was important to him,” says Jesse Ting.
It was during this period that Gillian Catto, founder of Artcatto gallery in Loulé, first visited him in 1994.
“He was surrounded by an array of pretty women. He showed us around his studio and home. In his wardrobes he had dozens of suits in a complete ray of Pantone colours, the brightest ones. He loved life and entered into all the fun cultural aspects of what was to be had. He was a unique and inspiring man. Once met, never forgotten,” she recalls.
In 2002, Walasse Ting suffered a brain haemorrhage and slipped into a coma, passing away on May 17 2010, in New York.
In 2016, the Musée Cernuschi in Paris held the first large-scale retrospective exhibition of Ting’s work in France.
His works can be found in museums and galleries around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, all in New York (USA); the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston (USA); the Art Institute of Chicago (USA); the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford (England); the Tate Gallery, in London (England); the Musée Cernuschi and Centre Pompidou, in Paris (France); Shanghai Art Museum (China); the Taipei Fine Art Museum (Taiwan); and the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the M+ museum, also in Hong Kong.
In the Algarve, the highly sought-after and collected original artwork of Walace Ting is on display at Artcatto gallery until the end of the year.
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