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Lot Essay
With its twirling black lines No. 104 (Lot 19) stands as a perfect example of Chu's early 1960s explorations in dark tonalities. The approach encompasses his inspirations from the Chinese calligraphy he practiced in his childhood, ink-wash traditional landscape depiction - a milestone in Chinese history of art - and the Western experiments with black color as a new means of conveying a visual abstract depth.
No. 104 shows energetic dark lines rushing through the middle of the composition such as intense clashing dramatic waves on a riotous sea. Chu Teh-Chun deliberately limits his palette to the use of ardent black reinforced by the contrast of smoother greys and pinched in places with faint red peeking out from underneath. The white hazy background frames this dark battle in horizontal perspective, a practice stemming from the Chinese landscape painting developed under the Tang Dynasty. The composition generates a powerful dynamic, a dramatic nebula, possibly mirroring an emotional tear in the painter's heart.
With his choice of oil paint, Chu surpasses the simple use of black as a color and further explores its density to create luminosity with texture. In traditional Chinese aesthetics black color opens up to an array of six combinations defined by Wang Wei, first Tang dynasty-era painter of the monochromic landscape: black, white, thick, thin, dry and wet. This oriental philosophy provided Chu with a whole new perspective, in light of the Western development of abstraction. While variations of ink black constitute one of the pillars of Chinese landscape painting philosophy the radical shade became the central concern of many European artists, contemporary to Chu Teh-Chun.
Among the most renowned artists of the Ecole de Paris, Pierre Soulages developed during the same period a practice based on black gradations. Soulages' large forceful brush strokes breaking away from a lighter background are not without recalling Chu's approach. Unlike earlier modern abstract painters who used black as a fundamental structural color, such as Malevitch and Mondrian, both Chu Teh-Chun and Soulages adopted the ultimate color as an agile expressive sensitive tool to suggest emotions, depth and light, turning away from the more rational and mathematical characteristics of the previous generation.
At the threshold between Western abstract art and poetic Chinese painting and calligraphy, extracting essence from both and integrating them into his personal style, Chu's art skillfully draws upon a universe of philosophies and ancient Chinese concepts to create sustained, turbulent imagery that mirrors one's most unsettling inner conflicts.
No. 104 shows energetic dark lines rushing through the middle of the composition such as intense clashing dramatic waves on a riotous sea. Chu Teh-Chun deliberately limits his palette to the use of ardent black reinforced by the contrast of smoother greys and pinched in places with faint red peeking out from underneath. The white hazy background frames this dark battle in horizontal perspective, a practice stemming from the Chinese landscape painting developed under the Tang Dynasty. The composition generates a powerful dynamic, a dramatic nebula, possibly mirroring an emotional tear in the painter's heart.
With his choice of oil paint, Chu surpasses the simple use of black as a color and further explores its density to create luminosity with texture. In traditional Chinese aesthetics black color opens up to an array of six combinations defined by Wang Wei, first Tang dynasty-era painter of the monochromic landscape: black, white, thick, thin, dry and wet. This oriental philosophy provided Chu with a whole new perspective, in light of the Western development of abstraction. While variations of ink black constitute one of the pillars of Chinese landscape painting philosophy the radical shade became the central concern of many European artists, contemporary to Chu Teh-Chun.
Among the most renowned artists of the Ecole de Paris, Pierre Soulages developed during the same period a practice based on black gradations. Soulages' large forceful brush strokes breaking away from a lighter background are not without recalling Chu's approach. Unlike earlier modern abstract painters who used black as a fundamental structural color, such as Malevitch and Mondrian, both Chu Teh-Chun and Soulages adopted the ultimate color as an agile expressive sensitive tool to suggest emotions, depth and light, turning away from the more rational and mathematical characteristics of the previous generation.
At the threshold between Western abstract art and poetic Chinese painting and calligraphy, extracting essence from both and integrating them into his personal style, Chu's art skillfully draws upon a universe of philosophies and ancient Chinese concepts to create sustained, turbulent imagery that mirrors one's most unsettling inner conflicts.