Ink and colour on paper

179.5×96.5 cm. 70 5/8×38 in

Signed in Chinese with one artist’s seal on bottom right
EXHIBITED
30 Jun – 31 Aug 2017, Memento, Sansiao Gallery, Hong Kong

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Asia

Beauty with Parrots by Walasse Ting
Romantic Artist
Walasse Ting （or Ding Xiongquan） was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, in 1920 and studied in the Shanghai Fine Arts School. In 1946, he went to Hong Kong to better develop his career and later decided to head to Paris six years later. It was there that his artistic talents really started to become elevated and released for viewing, and this was how he got to know representative artists of the famous CoBrA group, such as Pierre Alechinsky and Asger Jorn, with whom he held exhibitions in places like Paris and Brussels. After coming to New York in 1958, Walasse Ting was influenced by abstract expressionism and avant-garde art schools active in New York, and his art therefore became freer and more unrestrained. He also met like-minded artists such as Sam Francis and Andy Warhol, and he exchanged ideas with them as they all inspired each other, promoting the development of the active modern art community in the United States.
Unlike other artists of that time, Ting was well-versed in traditional Chinese materials, and he used Western acrylic paint on traditional Chinese rice paper. As the main themes of his creations include some of his female lovers as well as parrots and horses, he liked to call himself “Mr. Romantic”. The object of this auction, Beauty with Parrots is a typical representation of Ting’s work. On the right side of the picture, the artist used simple lines to depict an oriental woman with delicate eyes and eyebrows and a moon-shaped fan in her hands. She wears a fuchsia dress, similar in color to the background, and lazily glances at the flock of parrots on the left. Parrots are a very important element of Ting’s paintings, as he once had a parrot of his own that could speak in his native Wuxi-influenced Chinese, and since he lived abroad for many years, the parrot was able to remind him of his hometown. Beauty with Parrots features a total of ten of these brightly colored birds sitting in groups in a way that resembles a cluster of flowers in the garden, providing a wonderful sensory experience for the viewer. At the same time, the woman, even though wearing an extravagant, luxurious dress, seems lonely and full of melancholy. Many people are aware that Walasse Ting loved women and used them as primary protagonists for the entirety of his life, but this painting strongly shows what most do not realize： Ting’s unique awareness of the inner world of women.
The main theme of this painting combines the art of the East and the West, creating a rich world full of desire on traditional rice paper, which has become Ting’s signature style. It seems to be a microcosm of the artist himself. After experiencing all kinds of earthly pleasures, he had no choice but to spend the last days of his life unable to leave his bed and leave a legacy of legendary life experiences to posterity.
The Blooming of Art and Transcendence of Life
Ku Fu-sheng： China’s Most Highly-Renowned Figure of Modern Art
Modern art was just beginning to manifest itself in Taiwan in the 1950s and 60s, and it was during this time that Ku Fu-sheng was one of the few artists pursuing easel portrait paintings.
Leisurely Floating Along, Yearning for Home
This springtime auction features two noteworthy pieces by Ku Fu-sheng, Flower Water and Letting Go, both of which exemplify his lifelong creative pursuit of the exploration of the meaning of life. These pieces were completed after Ku immigrated to the United States, a period during which he began to gradually diversify his craft and mature as an artist. In Flower Water, the background serves as a recreation of his childhood memories of “Taiwanese printed cloth”. The artist’s typical image of a man lies in the center of the painting, hands crossed and eyes comfortably shut. The artist deliberately uses blue to paint around the protagonist, which gradually progresses from a sky blue around his lower body to a lake blue around his upper extremities, seemingly intoxicated in the surrounding dreamland of water and flowers. This piece is heavily inspired by the childhood memories of the artist： the man wading leisurely in the water appears to be just as serene as a young sleeping child wrapped in a quilt, both without a care in the world and both representing a suspension in time as wonderful hometown memories of the artist as a young boy.
A Juvenile Constantly on the Run
The second piece in this auction, Letting Go, was completed in 2013. The figure illustrated in the painting is that of a teenager leaping into the air, head over heels, all four limbs outstretched. The dynamism of the character depicted is similar to those of Ku’s early creations, but many of his previous works do not render the human body in its entirety. The character in this piece is more outstretched and complete in its presentation than in earlier works, and a large red balloon rises up the center of the canvas set against a light background, producing an aura as captivating as the sun that glows with vitality. At the time of the creation of Letting Go, Ku Fu-sheng had already entered into his 80s, but despite his old age, Ku’s creations continued to teem with life. It seemed that the older he got, the more vivid his paintings became. He appeared to retain an optimistic and cheerful mentality toward life, dedicating the remainder of his time on Earth to realizing artistic dreamery and symbolically running at the pace of a teenager.

Price estimate:
HKD: 420, 000 - 520, 000
USD: 53, 800 - 66, 700

Auction Result:
HKD: 495,600