ArtistChinese-American
Walasse Ting
1 active items
Walasse Ting was born Ding Xiongquan in Shanghai on 13 October 1929. He grew up in a city being transformed by war and ideology, and left China in 1946, first stopping in Hong Kong before eventually making his way to Paris in 1952. It was there, on the margins of the Saint-Germain scene, that he began a sustained conversation with the artists of CoBrA: Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, and Pierre Alechinsky, whose instinct for raw, expressive mark-making confirmed what Ting already sensed about the relationship between calligraphy and painting. He absorbed their energy without becoming one of them.
In 1957 he moved to New York, arriving just as Abstract Expressionism was giving way to Pop. His studio on Canal Street brought him into orbit with Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Sam Francis. The project that best captured this cross-Atlantic moment was the 1964 artist book '1¢ Life', which Ting conceived, wrote, and organized: 62 original lithographs contributed by 28 artists across both sides of the Atlantic, bound together with his own poetry. It was a singular act of curation at the exact hinge point between two movements.
Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, Ting consolidated the style he is most associated with today: figures of women, cats, flowers, parrots, and horses drawn in fast calligraphic brushstrokes and filled with flat, high-keyed acrylic color on rice paper and canvas. The forms are never labored. The pigment is almost always fluorescent, pulled from a palette somewhere between Fauvism and neon signage. He traveled repeatedly to Tahiti, where the chromatic intensity of the light pushed his colors further still. A 1970 Guggenheim Fellowship for drawing confirmed the art world's attention.
In the late 1980s, after the death of his wife Nathalie, Ting settled in Amsterdam, where the Keizersgracht canals reminded him of Hangzhou. He worked from a studio there for the rest of his productive life, painting a succession of models and returning to the theme of the woman with an almost obsessive consistency. A severe stroke in 2002 ended his ability to paint, and he died in New York on 17 May 2010.
On the Nordic auction market, Ting's work circulates steadily through both Danish and Swedish houses. The 28 items indexed on Auctionist have appeared at Bruun Rasmussen in Lyngby, Limhamns Auktionsbyrå, Uppsala Auktionskammare, and Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, with the category split concentrated in paintings and prints. Top results include an oil of a reclining woman among flowers at 18,000 SEK and signed lithographs from the late 1970s and mid-1980s reaching 4,800 DKK at Bruun Rasmussen.