Catalogue Raisonné

CHU TEH CHUN

Hailing from a family of collectors, Chu Teh-Chun was very familiar with calligraphy and Chinese painting. It was natural that he would be influenced by these in his artistic leanings. Outside his classes, he produced more than five hundred watercolours of landscapes. Personal circumstances made him turn away from his initial vocation for landscapes to study Western art.

After a solid art education in China, Chun Teh-Chung arrived in France in 1955, where Marseille and Paris opened the way to Western art for him. Strongly influenced by the aesthetics of the great masters, he interspersed his visits to the Louvre with regular sketching sessions at the Grande Chaumière and classes at the Alliance Française. Further travels in Europe completed his artistic cultural education, and Goya, Velasquez and El Greco introduced him to the riches of Spain. The work of Nicolas de Staël, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, had a massive impact on the Chinese artist. Without renouncing the teaching he had received from the old masters, Chu was drawn towards European modernity. The Rembrandt retrospective in Amsterdam inspired the technique t he used to treat light, which is highly characteristic of his work.

Throughout his life, Chu maintained close links with Chinese calligraphy, as evidenced by the many notebooks of poems he composed in his studio. This dual European and Chinese inspiration often adds its own touch of perfection to his glossy canvases full of flexibility and fluidity.

Europe enthusiastically acclaimed his talent, and he rapidly won several awards. However, it was the Taipei Museum of History that first dedicated a retrospective to him. He was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in France in 1997, before becoming the Dean, after Zao Wou-Ki, in 2013.

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