Acrylic on canvas

77 x 108 cm. 30 3/8 x 42 1/2 in.

Titled and signed in English， dated on reverse
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Asia

Although the Blossoms have since Fallen, They were once in Bloom
Walasse Ting's Fleeting Visions of Summer and Spring
Walasse Ting is an extremely influential figure among 20th Century Chinese avant-garde artists. He was born in 1929, and, at the tender age of 23, his love for art led him on a one-man journey to Paris. There, he made the acquaintance of important artists belonging to the CoBrA art movement such as Pierre Alechinsky and Asger Jorn, with whom he would eventually organize exhibitions. After he moved to New York in 1958, the colorful big-city life exerted a powerful influence on his work. He began to fuse East Asian aesthetics with his interpretation of Pop Art in order to form a highly unique painting style. From the 1970s until today, his exhibitions have been held in Europe, North America, and Asia, while a number of his works have been collected by notable institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum. In 2017, a retrospective held by the Musée Cernuschi in Paris allowed appreciators of the arts to look back on the work of the late Walasse Ting, a well-established and talented painter. This autumnal auction allows us to develop an understanding of Ting's outstanding accomplishments as an artist through an appreciation of seven of his works from different eras.
Cherishing the Profusion of Colors in Summer
Two of the works presented in this auction are still lifes: one, a large-scale work composed of acrylic paints and colorful ink, is simply entitled Still Life（Lot5） while the other, an oil painting, is entitled Summer Days（Lot6）. Summer Days is notable because of its liberal use of different colors； Ting has, on the backdrop of the blue sky, used oil paints to depict a profusion of flowers in bloom. The watermelon depicted in the painting serves as an emblem of summer. Meanwhile, the plums and peaches laid out on the table represent, with their vibrant colors, luxuriant growth and a passion for life. All the elements in the painting come together to form a startling and unique scene.
In his creations, Ting often uses color blocks and lines as well as automatist techniques, such as scattering and spraying materials or allowing them to drip onto or run down the canvas. He has a consummate grasp of both Western and Eastern media. Still Life is demonstrative of Ting's techniques as an artist. In the foreground are plums and peaches, which symbolize youth, while a smooth and round watermelon sits to one side. Accompanying these fruits is a cage in which some parrots are enclosed. From inside their seemingly luxurious enclosure, the parrots are focused on the world outside. In this painting, Walasse Ting, who at the time was 60 years old, attempts to convey to the viewer that life is like the fruits of summer and spring or a beautiful woman in her youth； with the passing of time, their colors eventually fade. It is perhaps the artist's sense of loss that lends this work its introspective, restrained beauty.
Resplendent Young Women: A Common Subject of Both Eastern and Western Art
At the beginning of the 1960s, Hugh Hefner chose to display full frontal nudity in his magazine Playboy. In addition to reflecting a growing freedom of expression, this stylistic choice reflected contemporary Western culture's growing appreciation for the female form. The sexual revolution of the 1960s had a significant influence on Walasse Ting. The 1974 painting Kiss Me, Kiss Me（Lot9） is one of the few works by Ting that depict full frontal female nudity. In this painting, a Western woman with orange hair stares at the viewer head-on. Her unabashed gaze is reminiscent of the Turkish courtesan depicted in Henri Matisse's painting from 1923 titled Moorish Woman with Upheld Arms. One of Ting's close friends, Ni Kuang, recalled that Ting dated a number of women in New York, suggesting that the subject of the painting was perhaps one of his former paramours. This further adds to the intimacy of the work.
By the 1980s, Walasse Ting had developed a preference for using acrylics and colorful ink on Xuan paper （a high-quality material from Anhui）. He also began to incorporate the minimalist lines of artist Bada Shanren into his works, thus contributing to his unique style. Three Beauties（Lot10） features a vertical composition that is typical of Ting's work. The artist has, in the center of the painting, depicted three Asian women holding parrots. Parrots are an important element in Ting's paintings, as he once had a parrot of his own which he taught to speak his native dialect. During the many decades that he lived abroad, parrots thus came to symbolize his distant hometown. The fields of saturated color that sweep across the Xuan paper evoke the enchanting presence of these women in full bloom.
This auction also features two of Ting's female portraits from the 1990s entitled Glancing（Lot7） and Yearning（Lot8）. These paintings, which depict the arresting posture and glances of two women of Asian descent, deserve to be appreciated by the viewer in all their subtlety.
A Warm Breeze that Tempts Us out of Hiding and into the World of Spring
In 1960, two years after Walasse Ting had moved from Paris to New York, he was inspired by his friend Sam Francis to depart from his prior explorations of pure abstractionism. In the September/October issue of Arts Asia, the renowned art critic John Seed dedicated an article to these two artists. This article was accompanied by an image of Ting's 1972 It's a Beautiful Day, Let's Talk a Walk（Lot11） as well as an explanation of its importance. After moving to New York, Ting seldom produced purely abstract works, and those that he did were often small in size. It's a Beautiful Day, Let's Talk a Walk is one of Ting's rare large-scale abstract paintings from this time. In it, cerulean blue acrylic paint serves as a backdrop onto which Ting casts drops of vibrant color that come together to form a flowing scene of blossoms falling in late spring. After spending many years in the possession of a New York art collector, this work has finally been released, allowing viewers to gain a further insight into the marvelous world of Ting's imagination.

Price estimate:
HKD: 180,000 - 250,000
USD: 22,900 - 31,800

Auction Result:
HKD : 472,000