Alisan Fine Arts is proud to announce the opening of Walasse Ting: Joy, Temptation and Magic, a survey exhibition of the artist’s evolution over five decades. While widely recognised for his exuberant and colourful paintings of Dionysiac nudes, luscious flowers and menagerie of animals, Walasse Ting (1928-2010) was a groundbreaking figure who bridged diverse Western movements - including CoBrA, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop art - with Chinese artistic traditions. This exhibition features representative works from each decade, spanning the 1950s to the 1990s, in mediums such as drawing, acrylic on canvas, and ink on paper, paying homage to his liberal meandering across Western and Eastern artistic influences, and unadulterated celebration of life’s abundance and temptations.

This comprehensive exhibition offers a vital exploration of the artist’s legacy, revealing facets of his oeuvre that have often been overshadowed by his well-recognised vibrant paintings of nudes and flowers. By showcasing early and lesser-known works—particularly in gestural abstraction and black-and-white painting—the exhibition reveals the depth and complexity of Ting’s creative spirit throughout his illustrious career. Ting’s long-standing relationship with Alisan Fine Arts dates back to his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong in 1986, organised by Alice King, the gallery’s co-founder, just five years into AFA’s operation. Since then, the gallery has mounted 12 solo exhibitions for the artist and has been instrumental in introducing Ting’s signature style to Asian audiences, helping to establish him as a significant figure in the Chinese art diaspora. His most recent exhibition, Walasse Ting: New York, New York, was held in the gallery's new location in New York in 2023, as its inaugural showcase.

Born in Wuxi, China, Walasse Ting briefly studied at the Shanghai Art Academy before leaving for Paris in 1948 at the age of nineteen. There, he became associated with artists belonging to the avant-garde group CoBrA. In 1958, he travelled to New York, where he befriended the American artists such as Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell; here, Ting became strongly influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. “Walasse,” Ting's chosen Western name, ingeniously combines his Shanghainese childhood nickname ‘Huai Lai Shee’ (壞得很, ‘very spoilt’) with a phonetic tribute to Henri Matisse. By deliberately aligning himself with the French master, Ting began crafting his artistic mythology—a strategy that would later echo Pop Art's preoccupation with the artist as celebrity.

In 1959, Ting mounted an exhibition at the historic Martha Jackson Gallery, the show consisted of a commanding series of monochromatic black-on-white action paintings, whose immediate and electrifying traces held their own against the era-defining paintings of Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Adolph Gottlieb. A rare exemplary painting from the same period, I Love You, 1959, is a highlight of the upcoming exhibition.

In 1964, Ting published the seminal One Cent Life, edited by Francis and published by E.W.Kornfeld, which involved collaborating with twenty-eight European and American Pop Art and Expressionism artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselman and Robert Rauschenberg, and included sixty-two original lithographs. A work from this decade, Summer Symphony (Painted with Beethoven Symphony No.4), 1967 (fig.1), celebrates the gestural bravado that must have been influenced by the circle of Abstract Expressionists surrounding him during the peak of the movement.

In 1977, Ting won the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for his drawings and by the 1980s, he began experimenting with figures, developing the distinctive style that we are so familiar with today. This exhibition will feature two examples of Ting’s drawings in the 70s and 80s (fig.3), and several acrylic paintings, providing invaluable insights into this inventive and transformative period of his career: the effortless transition between abstraction and figuration, drawing to painting, ink to acrylic… And for his prolific decade of the 90s, Ting painted in a rich palette of bright acrylics on rice paper, layered with powerful effervescent brushstrokes in Chinese ink, of which a monumental painting of parrots, Nine Rainbow Parrots 1, 1990s (fig.4), is exemplary. Looking as a whole, Ting’s oeuvre is a sheer testimony to love, life and beauty, and an emphatic amalgamation of Western and Chinese sensibilities, a legacy that is nothing short of magic.

Ting’s unorthodox approach to life and art, along with his resistance to conventional theorizing of his artistic career, have emerged as the very qualities that make his art groundbreaking. Richard Speer writes of Ting’s retrospective at NSU Art Museum in Artforum, “Today we can appreciate Ting’s deft integration of Asian genres with styles he explored in the West, but during his lifetime he was often ghettoized as an ‘Oriental’ painter… The retrospective built a compelling case for reframing this synthesis as sui generis and historically significant. (“Walasse Ting, Nova Southeastern University Art Museum,” Artforum, May 2024)

Ting's first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Walasse Ting: Parrot Jungle, took place at the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale in 2023. In 2016, the Musée Cernuschi in Paris also held the first large-scale retrospective exhibition of Ting's work in France. His works have been collected by major museums around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Chicago Institute of Art; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Tate Gallery, London; Musée Cernuschi, Paris; Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; Taipei Fine Art Museum, Taiwan; Hong Kong Museum of Art; M+, Hong Kong.