Chu Teh-ChunSans Titre
2008
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated lower right
25.59 x 31.89 in ( 65 x 81 cm )

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Inquiry - Sans Titre, 2008

The strength and richness of Chu Teh-Chun's works are issues of the meeting between cultures, Eastern and Western. This canvas characterize this fusion. It combines the tradition of landscape painting and calligraphy "mirror of the Chinese soul“, to the movement of lyrical abstraction. The artist's gestures are both mastered and carried away by this desire for freedom of expression. Different shades of brown dominate this dynamic composition, thus staging a powerful, deep and bubbling nature. Influenced by Rembrandt's classic chiaroscuro, Chu Teh-Chun achieves contrasts of shadow and light, becoming the dual forces of Yin and Yang.

“As a Chinese, yin and yang, two infinitely changing elements in I-Ching philosophies, have fundamental but complementary aspects: yang is warm and bright, and yin is dark and moist. This duality produces the infinite universe, but this duality also mixes with the bright colors of Western European painting and the free forms inspired by abstract painting”.

Chu Teh-Chun

Chu Teh-Chun was born in 1920 in Jiangsu province (China).

The youngest son of a wealthy family, his father is a collector of traditional Chinese painting. He was admitted in 1935 to the Hangzhou Art Academy. He first became interested in the traditional style, then later opted for western painting. In 1937, the Sino-Japanese War caused the exodus of universities to the west of China. Teh-Chun graduated in 1941; he was immediately appointed assistant professor in his own school, then full professor in 1942 at the University of Nanjing. He travels, discovers Chinese landscapes which are sources of inspiration (descent of Yangzejiang).

After the Second World War, he moved to Taipei. In 1951, he was a professor at the National Normal University, where he taught Western painting. In 1955, in order to perfect his culture of art, he moved to Paris after a trip which made him discover other countries and other landscapes - Egypt in particular -. He painted the landscapes of Paris, worked at the Grande Chaumière where he met other painters, traveled to Europe. He was fascinated by Nicolas de Staël's retrospective which made him truly discover abstract art.

His first solo exhibition will take place in Paris in 1957. He then frequented artists from the Paris School like Soulages, Hartung or Mathieu. His art met his first successes and spread abroad thanks to group exhibitions in which he participated (Pittsburg, Jerusalem, Athens, Sao Paulo).

The artist seems to open a new chapter in the art of landscape, a landscape in which subtle poetry mixes. Virtuoso, inspired by calligraphy as by the signs and the mood of the Orient, he realizes an important graphic work, draws, realizes ceramics, paints large formats, diptychs, triptychs, monumental works, always inventing a writing personal between poetry and painting. In 1987, the National Museum of Taipei organized a large retrospective exhibition for him; it is his return, for the first time, to his native country. In 1997, he was elected to the Academy of Fine Arts of the Institut de France. For “the year of China in France” (2004), no less than four exhibitions are organized to celebrate it.

The artist died on March 25, 2014 in Paris, he was 93 years old.