Walasse Ting

The prolific, self-taught artist Walasse Ting is known for exuberant paintings of human and animal subjects, including parrots, cats, horses, and nudes. Informed by Chinese calligraphy techniques, these figurative works, won Ting the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Drawing in 1970. Ting nurtured his talent painting on sidewalks as a youth in Shanghai. When he settled in Paris in 1952, he fell in with the avant-garde group CoBrA, whose emphasis on spontaneity left a lasting impression on him. Five years later, Ting moved to New York City, where —exposed to Pop art and Abstract Expressionism —he developed his mature style of vivid, gestural painting. Ting has also published several books that include 1 Cent Life, a collection featuring a manifesto, poems, and paintings that he and 27 of his contemporaries have written. His works are in the collections of institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, and the Musée Cernuschi in Paris.