Who was the artist Walasse Ting?
Walasse Ting was a genre-breaking Chinese painter who worked in Paris, New York and Amsterdam. The artist’s geographical mobility and artistic agility foreshadowed the international development of contemporary Chinese art in the 1990s. Ting formed an essential link between the CoBrA movement, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.
Walasse Ting was born in Wuxi, China, in 1928 and grew up in Shanghai. Not much is known about Walasse Ting’s artist training. He is said to have studied for a short time at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, before leaving China for Hong Kong in 1946. Walasse Ting arrived in Paris in 1953 and moved to New York in 1957. It was there that he discovered the abstract expressionists, in particular those artists with ties to France such as the American painters Sam Francis, Paul Jenkins and Joan Mitchell. These artistic influences sparked the artist’s passion for colour. The Chinese painter Walasse Ting became an American citizen in the 1970s. Walasse Ting moved to Amsterdam in the 1990s, continuing to travel to New York on a regular basis.
If you would like to find out more about the artist Walasse Ting and his works, please visit the Chinese painter’s dedicated page.
