EXHIBITION > MARCH 4 – 16, 2024
T’ang Haywen was a Chinese artist who grew up in Vietnam and moved to France in 1948. He was 21 years old. In Paris, he came to study medicine, but he decided to draw. He preferred to attend the Académie libre de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse, rather than studying at the official Académie des Beaux-Arts. All his life and his work are crossed by the same breath, an impulse of freedom. His choice was a result of a strong, resolute and assumed inner journey: “There is no doubt that the play of abstraction can briefly inspire people’s thoughts in an instant, but when it comes to deciphering and understanding the past, there is no further flourishing of sensibility, numbers are dead and even memories disappear. Our profound sensibility, related to the unconscious, can only develop and grow when nourished by the tangible, that is to say, as far as painting is concerned, by the recollection in our conscious memory of profound and lasting sensitive experiences that we have had in the real world. It is on the basis of a certain, and more or less preponderant, material figurative representation that painting can develop and renew itself without losing itself and expand into the realms of emotion and spirituality…” he wrote to his brother in 1958. He was 31 years old.
As Zao Wou-Ki and Chu Teh-Chun his compatriots, T’ang Haywen was the painter of abstract landscapes in which the thought and the gesture mingle.
T’ang Haywen drawed his inspiration in himself, strongly influenced by Taoist philosophy.
His abstract landscapes in ink testify to a tension between the full and the empty, the black and the white, the visible and the invisible. Since 1968, T’ang Haywen created diptych works. He preferred the use of paper and one format in particular: 70 x 100 cm.
During the T’ang Haywen monographic exhibition at the Guimet Museum where 200 works and 400 archival elements are exhibited, the Galerie Diane de Polignac presents 5 ink diptychs. An opportunity to discover or rediscover the work of this great XXth century artist.
