CHU TEH CHUN (1920-2014)

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Lot n° 61
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180000 - 220000 EUR
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Result : 265 000EUR
CHU TEH CHUN (1920-2014)
May 6, 1977, (19) 77 Oil on canvas. Signed lower right, dated May 6 (19) 77 on the back. 92 x 65 cm Provenance: - Acquired from the artist. - Collection of M.X - Private collection Bibliography: Chu Teh-Chun by Jean-Pierre Rémy, Edition de la différence, Paris 2006, reproduced p.132 As early as 1958, Michel Ragon, a young critic and active activist of abstraction, noticed Chu Teh Chun who exhibited in Parisian galleries alongside Sugaï, Key Sato, Francis Bott, Doucet, Corneille... The Legendre gallery, directed by Maurice Panier, offered him an exclusive six-year contract that year. His director wrote about Chu: "His starting point is most often landscapes or the stanzas of a poem (ancient Chinese) that he translates into plastic language. Combining the delicacy and spirituality of Asian aesthetics with the brilliance and ardor of modern abstraction, Chu Teh Chun develops this very specific form of abstraction that seems surprisingly Western to the Chinese and so curiously Asian to the Westerners... Chu Teh-Chun is also inspired by the old masters. In 1970, he went to Amsterdam to attend the retrospective of the 300th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth. Literally overwhelmed by the use of chiaroscuro and the virtuoso handling of blacks and their inseparable whites, he was also fascinated by the extraordinary intensity of golds, browns and dark reds. For Chu, Rembrandt expresses through his painting the two fundamental principles of action and reaction of Chinese cosmology: yang, light and warmth, and yin, darkness and humility, combining in complementary and contradictory ways. Our painting, May 6, 1977, is composed of mostly ochre, red and orange tones mixed with a luminous white merging with black. The palette lightens in the center of the composition to let a tumultuous blaze of clear strokes punctuated by flashes of light. A yellow glow radiates in the disturbing darkness of a warm brown married to a floating red. His technique is unique and the movement of his brush is sinuous and sensual. The trace of Chu's curved gestures shines through the canvas and the forms flow, intuitive and musical. Chu elaborates a complex language by seeking to tame the movements of light. He skilfully superimposes layers of oil, revealing incandescent glows through the effects of diaphanous transparency. There is no emptiness in his work which intensely exploits the full space. The fusion of European and Chinese traditions makes Chu Teh-Chun one of the most important Chinese artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
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