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Lot Essay
Walasse Ting—flowers and women being the two subjects most beloved of this self-styled 'flower pirate.' Surrounding himself at every moment with such beauty, the flowers and the lovely women inspired all the brightness of his paintings. The undeniable appeal of his works derives not just from the idea of the debonair 'flower thieves' of the martial arts literature, but much more from a genuine and innocent love of all things beautiful in the world. Walasse Ting revealed that 'I paint in oils with all kinds of different colors, just like a garden with so many colorful flowers. The Flower Pirate is but a bee or butterfly.' Ting moved with total freedom in the world of nature, developing a highly recognizable artistic vocabulary of his own through which he candidly and openly expressed his love of beauty. In the two Walasse Ting works presented here by Christie's, we discover a dialogue with several Western schools of painting, and even as he adopts their bold and energetic styles as a framework, Ting's art exudes its own kind of Eastern charm and grace.
Born in Jiangsu and raised in Shanghai, Ting has a cultural foundation that was rooted in Chinese poetry, ink painting, and calligraphy. But the artist, expanding his outlook as he traveled around the world, was never shackled by the weight of this tradition. In Paris, he gained much from contact with the Post-Impressionists and the avant-garde Cobra movement, finding rich and subtle variations of color within their bright, dazzling palette. Settling in New York in the '60s, Ting wholeheartedly threw himself into the revolutions of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art and joined a wide circle of friends among the avant-garde. But he never abandoned the vital expression of poems, and in 1970 he even published an album of poetry and painting, tittled 1 Cent Life, with his friends Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. While the poetry and paintings may not have been too modern or consistent in form, they were tremendously imaginative and provided a link to the breadth and insight of the ancient Chinese tradition.
Ting's poetic spirit is expressed with dash and lovely detail in Raining Sunshine, where he employs a flamboyant Western style even as he conveys an Eastern grace and dignity. Ting's colors flow freely across the canvas, forming lines that explode with powerful vitality; the harmonious balance within this disorder recalls the unique style of Ting's good friend, the great Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell. Ting held a joint exhibition along with Mitchell and Sam Francis in 1972 under the collective name he gave them, 'The Fresh Air School.' Utterly natural, unaffected, and refreshing, their works, which transformed their personal environments into colors on canvas, were well-received by the American art world.
Unlike his two friends, Ting's work was founded in nature painting techniques, even as he manages to retain, in his own peerless fashion, an Eastern pictorial sense. A gorgeous region of red-orange in the upper left releases energy in a brilliant sunburst, conjuring the scene 'the deep misty rain falls in a thousand silk threads.' Here the two diametrically opposed images of sun and rain meet, as in the Liu Yuxi poem, 'The sun is up in the East; the rain spreads across the West. Even in the mists the sun is aglow.' Eastern philosophy unites the two extremes of weather, showing them as transformations of each other, as reflected in Ting's gentle, peaceful union of the two within a bold Western flair.
Ting's I Have Honey in My Eyes incorporates a classical Western composition within a Pop art framework, while both are enriched with a charm derived from traditional Chinese ink-wash painting. A woman reclines on a gray chair, her lanky figure stretched in a beautiful feminine pose. Once Ingres had painted his Grand Odalisque, a portrait of an exotic Turkish palace concubine as she appeared to the Western imagination, great painters such as Renoir and Matisse were inspired to produce compositions of their own with similar features of Orientalism. The grand odalisque theme became an expression of 'the East as seen through Western eyes.' Walasse Ting renewed this theme of the odalisque, but in his case within a Pop art context, viewed from an Eastern perspective, and using Western forms, through which he conveys a graceful female figure couched in a Chinese aesthetic. The extreme flattening of perspective in the composition highlights the separate bands of color in a manner recalling the aesthetic of Pop artist Tom Wesselman, as both artists produced nudes with an appealing abstract beauty in brightly contrasting colors. The wheat-colored skin and amorous, smiling red lips of Wesselman's nude on a sunny beach reflect the free, laid-back Californian attitude.
Walasse Ting's reclining figure is much more like the famous, elegant Shanghai ladies in the movie posters of yesteryear, with their 'artful, winning smiles and longing, expectant eyes.' We see only that his subject is lying back on a grey sofa, her violet skirts billowing loosely and falling about her legs; she floats like a lotus in clear water, the flowers adorning her hairpin echoing the blooms in the background. Unlike some of his more revealing nudes in the oil medium, Ting here allows his colors to spread like washes of ink in a Chinese painting, smudging the borders of his pastels until they blend smoothly rather than meeting in sharp, angular edges, an effect that seems to wrap his charming subject in a soft layer of gauze. The feminine beauty Ting projects in I Have Honey in My Eyes is perfectly judged, strongly flavored but tactfully mellowed, until she exemplifies the idea of being 'from this world of red dust yet untouched by it.' Walasse Ting's light, gentle presentation of his subject's romantic feelings in this painting achieves a unique and distinctly Eastern character.
Walasse Ting's pursuit of beauty, which he found in flowers, in nature, in the female beauty, and in the world around him, reflected his intense gaze, his deep affection, and his largeness of spirit. 'And though I feel a thousand feelings, to whom can I speak of them?' Remaining open to life and cherishing it, Ting never for a moment concealed his feelings, but instead transformed them into the fresh Eastern style of his paintings. Viewers cannot help but feel close to this artist, and each will likely come away feeling refreshed, lighter at heart, and filled with beautiful reflections.
Born in Jiangsu and raised in Shanghai, Ting has a cultural foundation that was rooted in Chinese poetry, ink painting, and calligraphy. But the artist, expanding his outlook as he traveled around the world, was never shackled by the weight of this tradition. In Paris, he gained much from contact with the Post-Impressionists and the avant-garde Cobra movement, finding rich and subtle variations of color within their bright, dazzling palette. Settling in New York in the '60s, Ting wholeheartedly threw himself into the revolutions of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art and joined a wide circle of friends among the avant-garde. But he never abandoned the vital expression of poems, and in 1970 he even published an album of poetry and painting, tittled 1 Cent Life, with his friends Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. While the poetry and paintings may not have been too modern or consistent in form, they were tremendously imaginative and provided a link to the breadth and insight of the ancient Chinese tradition.
Ting's poetic spirit is expressed with dash and lovely detail in Raining Sunshine, where he employs a flamboyant Western style even as he conveys an Eastern grace and dignity. Ting's colors flow freely across the canvas, forming lines that explode with powerful vitality; the harmonious balance within this disorder recalls the unique style of Ting's good friend, the great Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell. Ting held a joint exhibition along with Mitchell and Sam Francis in 1972 under the collective name he gave them, 'The Fresh Air School.' Utterly natural, unaffected, and refreshing, their works, which transformed their personal environments into colors on canvas, were well-received by the American art world.
Unlike his two friends, Ting's work was founded in nature painting techniques, even as he manages to retain, in his own peerless fashion, an Eastern pictorial sense. A gorgeous region of red-orange in the upper left releases energy in a brilliant sunburst, conjuring the scene 'the deep misty rain falls in a thousand silk threads.' Here the two diametrically opposed images of sun and rain meet, as in the Liu Yuxi poem, 'The sun is up in the East; the rain spreads across the West. Even in the mists the sun is aglow.' Eastern philosophy unites the two extremes of weather, showing them as transformations of each other, as reflected in Ting's gentle, peaceful union of the two within a bold Western flair.
Ting's I Have Honey in My Eyes incorporates a classical Western composition within a Pop art framework, while both are enriched with a charm derived from traditional Chinese ink-wash painting. A woman reclines on a gray chair, her lanky figure stretched in a beautiful feminine pose. Once Ingres had painted his Grand Odalisque, a portrait of an exotic Turkish palace concubine as she appeared to the Western imagination, great painters such as Renoir and Matisse were inspired to produce compositions of their own with similar features of Orientalism. The grand odalisque theme became an expression of 'the East as seen through Western eyes.' Walasse Ting renewed this theme of the odalisque, but in his case within a Pop art context, viewed from an Eastern perspective, and using Western forms, through which he conveys a graceful female figure couched in a Chinese aesthetic. The extreme flattening of perspective in the composition highlights the separate bands of color in a manner recalling the aesthetic of Pop artist Tom Wesselman, as both artists produced nudes with an appealing abstract beauty in brightly contrasting colors. The wheat-colored skin and amorous, smiling red lips of Wesselman's nude on a sunny beach reflect the free, laid-back Californian attitude.
Walasse Ting's reclining figure is much more like the famous, elegant Shanghai ladies in the movie posters of yesteryear, with their 'artful, winning smiles and longing, expectant eyes.' We see only that his subject is lying back on a grey sofa, her violet skirts billowing loosely and falling about her legs; she floats like a lotus in clear water, the flowers adorning her hairpin echoing the blooms in the background. Unlike some of his more revealing nudes in the oil medium, Ting here allows his colors to spread like washes of ink in a Chinese painting, smudging the borders of his pastels until they blend smoothly rather than meeting in sharp, angular edges, an effect that seems to wrap his charming subject in a soft layer of gauze. The feminine beauty Ting projects in I Have Honey in My Eyes is perfectly judged, strongly flavored but tactfully mellowed, until she exemplifies the idea of being 'from this world of red dust yet untouched by it.' Walasse Ting's light, gentle presentation of his subject's romantic feelings in this painting achieves a unique and distinctly Eastern character.
Walasse Ting's pursuit of beauty, which he found in flowers, in nature, in the female beauty, and in the world around him, reflected his intense gaze, his deep affection, and his largeness of spirit. 'And though I feel a thousand feelings, to whom can I speak of them?' Remaining open to life and cherishing it, Ting never for a moment concealed his feelings, but instead transformed them into the fresh Eastern style of his paintings. Viewers cannot help but feel close to this artist, and each will likely come away feeling refreshed, lighter at heart, and filled with beautiful reflections.