Walasse Ting

Biography

For the portfolio “One Cent Life”, in 1964 Walasse Ting gathered lithographs by twenty-eight artists, among them Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist. To the pictures he added his own poems. The edition ran to two thousand copies, and the portfolio was published in Bern by Eberhard W. Kornfeld.

Ting was born on 13 October 1929 in Wuxi, the youngest of four sons in a family that owned factories. Shanghai is also given as his birthplace, and 1928 is sometimes given as the year of his birth. For several years he attended the Shanghai College of Fine Arts, but later described himself as largely self-taught. In 1946 or in 1951 (the exact date is not known) he arrived in Hong Kong; in 1952 his first exhibition took place there.

Ting came to Paris in the early 1950s. By his own account, he first washed cars in a garage, but fairly quickly fell in with the avant-garde: Karel Appel, Asger Jorn and Pierre Alechinsky, members of the CoBrA group. With Alechinsky he later made hundreds of joint sheets, which they called “Alechings”.

In 1957 Ting moved to New York. His first show there, in 1959, was of black-and-white works in the spirit of Abstract Expressionism. He kept company with Claes Oldenburg, Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis, gave dinners where artists from different circles met, and helped young Chinese and Taiwanese artists in America to find places to exhibit. From 1963 he was shown by the Lefebre Gallery in New York. In 1962 he had married the artist Natalie Lipton; the family were among the first residents of Westbeth, an artists’ housing complex in Greenwich Village.

From the mid-1970s his manner changed. From abstraction he moved to more representational painting: broad areas of colour, a Chinese brush, acrylic. Chinese ink painting, Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism all suggested motifs. He introduced Dan Flavin to Japanese ink, persuaded Alechinsky to try acrylic, and with Francis explored how to combine Western gesture with Asian brush technique. His favourite subjects were nude women (“Cat Women”, as he called them), flowers, cats, parrots, peacocks and carp. Some of the bird motifs are linked to visits to the Parrot Jungle in Miami. He often signed his works with a playful nickname, “flower thief”.

Ting wrote his poems in English, short and compressed, and published the collections at his own expense. In all he published thirteen books, among them “All in my Head” (1974, with Roland Topor).

In 1970 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for drawing. His works are in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Tate Modern in London, the Centre Pompidou and the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Later he travelled to China several times and exhibited more often in Asia. In the 1980s he opened a studio in Amsterdam and lived between there and New York; from 2001, according to some accounts, he settled in Amsterdam for good. After 2002 he could no longer paint.

Walasse Ting died on 17 May 2010 in New York, in Manhattan. A solo museum exhibition in the United States, “Parrot Jungle”, was held at the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale only in late 2023.