Collection: Ting Walasse

(Shanghai 1929 - New York 2010)

Walasse Ting was one of the most cosmopolitan and disruptive figures of the second half of the twentieth century, capable of merging abstract expressionism, Pop Art, and the deep tradition of Eastern calligraphy into a completely personal language. Self-taught, he left China in 1946, stayed in Hong Kong, and settled in Paris in 1952, where he formed deep connections with the CoBrA group and with artists like Karel Appel, Pierre Alechinsky, and Asger Jorn. In 1957, he moved to New York, where his interactions with Sam Francis and immersion in the Pop scene and American abstract expressionism definitively shaped his vision.
His lithographs – technically the most sought-after works in the market – depict the subjects that made him famous: women, felines, flowers, birds, in fields of saturated and fluorescent color that retain all the vitality of his mark.
In 1964, together with his friend Sam Francis, who edited it, he conceived Life, a portfolio-book published by Eberhard W. Kornfeld in Bern with 62 original lithographs by 28 American and European artists (from Warhol to Lichtenstein, from Rauschenberg to Alechinsky) accompanied by his poems: a capital document of the Pop season and a masterpiece of twentieth-century graphics.
In 1970, he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for drawing and graphics, a recognition from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation among the most prestigious in the world of American art.
His works are held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Centre Pompidou, among others.