« Becoming an international artist, remaining a Chinese one: Walasse Ting / 一位中国的国际艺术家: 丁雄泉 » in Bali danqing, ershi shiji zhongguo huajia zhan 巴黎丹青，二十世纪中国画家展 [Hong Kong : Hong Kong museum of arts, 20 juin – 21 septembre 2014] (original) (raw)
Seldom has a Chinese artist been an actor in as many artistic movements as Walasse Ting. An adherent of the already disbanded CoBrA movement (see. pp. 54–65), a fi gure on the New York art scene, as a representative of Abstract Expressionism as well as Pop Art, Ting stands out as a key fi gure in the history of Western art. In addition, he deployed substantial efforts to mold, at least partially, the public perception of this history and his role in it. Thus, the Fresh Air School exhibition presents itself as the formalization of a new artistic movement, of which he was one of the pillars, alongside Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) and Sam Francis (1923–1994). 2 Ting's monographs, veritable artist's books, are as much a tool for creation as a means of diffusion, a way to impose a prescriptive reading of his work, extending it even to the 2010 posthumous retrospective in Taipei. 3 It determined the reproduced texts and artworks as well as the page layout. Judging from the books Walasse Ting published, he appears to have burst onto the international contemporary art scene by adopting a gestural expression dominant in the West, then to have shone by using his ability to assimilate and to reinterpret the different avant-gardes that he frequented. Consequently, his return to Chinese tradition in the mid-1970s stands out as a logical continuation of the Westernized female fi gures in his earlier output. Nevertheless, an artist's own explanations of his work must be examined with circumspection, particularly in Ting's case, as he ingeniously covered his tracks, crafting characters who at once masked and revealed him (see pp. 15–23). Fortunately, his poetic and pictorial output was so prolifi c that the many discordances and discreet revelations suggest other narratives intertwined with the main plot of his life and career. Pierre Alechinsky compared the artist to a " mountain with a Western slope strewn with adopted materials, canvases, paints, and brushe s, and recommended by the artist. On his more secretive northern slope, he doesn't really want people to follow him. And yet, a trail, more unexpected than classical, blazes through a shaded valley where a stream of ink runs in every season. This capricious, dark serpent reaches place after place bearing the mark Essay
Walasse Ting, the Flower Thief, 2017