No longer overlooked, Walasse Ting, who bridged cultures with paint and prose

This article is part of OverlookedA series of death reports about remarkable people whose dead, starting in 1851, was not reported in time.

Flicker among the most important figures of post -war art – the minimalist sculptor Then flavinthe avant-garde artist Pierre AlechinskyThe abstract painter Sam Francis And others – is the radiant shadow of Walasse Ting.

Ting, a painter and poet from China, introduced Flavin To Japanese ink. He turned around Alechinsky On to acrylic paint. Together he and Francis explored the interplay between Western action painting and Asian brush techniques.

In an era in which artists were typically silenced by geography and genre, Ting broke freely and effortlessly created fertile connections wherever he went. His own work, at its best, the elegance and delicacy of traditional Chinese ink painting with a striking palette that is equally influenced by American pop art and the lurid colors of Florida flood that he visited, Parrot Jungle (now (now (now (now (now (now (now (now (now (now (now Jungle Island) in West Palm Beach.

Learning to paint in Shanghai, travel to the avant-garde circles of Paris and settled between the pop-driven studios of New York gave him a rare, fluency in several visual languages. In every city he absorbed and reformed the dominant styles around him before he all collapsed the distances among them.

Walasse (pronounced Wallace) Ting was born on October 13, 1928 in Wuxi, China, near Shanghai, the youngest of three sons of Ting Ho Ching and Ying Ping Si, who owned and managed in Wuxi, China, the youngest of three sons of Ting and Ying Ping Si.

Although he had been registered at the Shanghai College of Fine Arts for a few years, he was never a student-hey later ‘autodidact’ and in any case, China still faltered the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. At the insistence of his father, who provided the final triumph of the Communist Party in 1949, Ting left the mainland of China and traveled through Asia for two years before he arrived in Hong Kong in 1951. There he stayed with a rich uncle and in 1952 he had his first artist point: “Modern paintings of Eastern and Western and Western styles.”

The following year he took a boat to France, arrived in Marseille and from there went to Paris, where he took over the name Walasse, with a spelling that called Henri Matisse and a sound reminiscent of a children’s name for children who meant ‘spoiled’.

Ting started washing cars at a garage, laughing when French customers, with the help of a down -bending term for Chinese men, appealed to him as Charlie. But soon he became friends with Asger Jorn, Karel Appel and Alechinsky, painters of the Cobra groupAn expressionist movement that focused on color and vitality. (The name of the group refers to Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam, the cities from which the founders came.) Later he and Alechinsky worked together on hundreds of explosive energetic paintings that they called ‘Alechings’.

Ting arrived in New York in 1957 and had his debut show of Zwarte-Witte Actionachings in 1959. He became friends Claes Oldenburg” Joan Mitchell And Sam FrancisAnd introduced many other artists together on raw dinners that he organized. He ate hot and sour soup with Oldenburg and the painter Tom Wesselmann And served as a kind of mentor for a group of Taiwanese poets who respectfully called him ‘Lao Ting’ or ‘Old Ting’. He helped Ming Fay And other Chinese artists in America find exhibition opportunities and continue to visit Paris, transport ideas and techniques between the two artificial capitals.

But although his own work was collected by large museums and was regularly exhibited, Ting’s career was impeded because “he was not Chinese enough for the Chinese or Americans enough for the Americans” First institutional solo show In the United States, in 2023 in the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, FLA. (Part of Nova SouthEasters University).

His daughter Mia Ting said in a telephone interview: “Even if it didn’t go great for him, he was very confident, so I think he gave a lot of people confidence.”

The most tangible monument for Ting is his book from 1964, “‘1 ¢ Life“A collection of 60 color lithographs through a cross -section of artists from the 60s, most of the works that he wrote above original poems, which he wrote in a style that has transferred the distinctive compression of classical Chinese in English.

From Andy Warhol came Four glittering grim mouths Floating about the poem of Mr. Ting ‘Jade White Butterfly’. Roy Lichtenstein’s two -page spread presented a smiling blonde woman in his characteristic Ben-Day stands and a close-up of a spray tin. Kiki Kogelnik designed a Collageed Red Rocket to wear the poem of Ting “Orange Naked Woman”In space. Joan Mitchell has a Energetic Black Cloudand Ting himself made a sensual Yellow and red Odalisque.

Wesselmann‘s Pop Art Riff on the American flag appeared above a special telegraphic text:

“Stomach sunk in whiskey / puddle in pants / I saw a small star / where is my baby tonight.”

Two thousand copies of “1 ¢ LifeWere published by the Swiss gallerist and art historian Eberhard KornfeldWith expenditures that are endorsed by the Detroit -collector Florence Barron. The book was a hit. It is regularly exhibited and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The productive artistic practice of Ting went through many phases. The NSU Art Museum Show, “”Walasse Ting: Parrot Jungle“A series of narrow green acrylic and ink paintings on paper included almost six feet long. On one, a parrot with a round, light green head seems to be floating on a single branchy feet, his powder blue wing wicked around his shoulder like a cloak. In another, a Papegarrot with an orange head and yellow troils.

There are heavy, wet-looking carp, explosively colorful flowers, exuberant chalk groplers, colossal cats, a flat, striking watermelon-in the short, a whole natural world that shines as reflected in a stream. In “Green Peacock”, a lonely bird tail, shown in a rich green and marked in ink with a herringbone pattern and strewn, such as a plum tree, with royal blue spots, a sheet of paper fills eight feet long. Ting made drop paintings à la Jackson Pollock, but with brighter, more accessible colors; portraits, deconstructed à la Willem de Kooning; And many explicit nudes.

What united them all was the cautious insight of Ting that an artist could draw from every culture he encountered. There are clear acrylic colors not in traditional ink painting, but they can be applied with the sensitivity of an ink painter, and the same liquid line, carefully applied, can both evoke italic Chinese characters and Matisse.

Ting married Natalie Lipton, a painter and commercial artist in 1962. He started to show in 1963 with Lefebre Gallery in Manhattan. Together with Lipton and their children, Mia and Jesse WestbethA subsidized residential community for artists in the West Village.

Later in life, Ting visited China and showed more often in Asia.

He died on 17 May 2010 in a long -term care institution in Manhattan. He was 81. Death, which was not broadly reported at the time, was caused by complications of a brain haemorrhage. His wife had died In 1983.

Ting itself published different parts of poetry, one of which was translated from classical Chinese. All were written in the same clad, Billboard-like English.

‘All kinds of love’, which appeared in ‘1 ¢ Life’ under a two -page spread throughout by Oldenburg of a female profile that looks at a giant slice of cake, starts:

Parent loves children as a summer garden fixed tree
Husband Love Wife As long distance call
Man loves mistress as a rainbow in pocket
Girl love man as an open dream

‘Black Stone’, written for Sam Francis and appears under an exciting spread of two pages of primary colored splashes and dots, ends with the lines:

“Who say no beauty in this world / who say no truth on earth”