Chu Teh-Chun
Took Chinese calligraphic training into French abstraction and never quite left either behind.
Chu Teh-Chun was born in Jiangsu province in 1920 and trained at the Hangzhou National College of Art alongside Zao Wou-Ki, under Lin Fengmian. He taught in Taiwan through the 1950s and moved to Paris in 1955, where a Nicolas de Stael retrospective the following year turned him decisively towards abstraction. What followed is a body of painting that reads simultaneously as lyrical abstraction in the French post-war manner and as the landscape and calligraphic tradition he was raised in: light breaking through darkness, gestures that behave like brush strokes because they are. He was elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts in 1997, the first member of Chinese origin, and died in 2014.
Oils on canvas are the principal market and are unique. Dating matters a great deal, as the palette and handling change markedly between the 1960s, the luminous 1980s canvases and the late work. Titles are frequently numbered rather than descriptive, and the same title recurs, so the inventory number and dimensions are what identify a specific painting. He signed in both Chinese characters and Latin letters, usually both, on the face and again on the reverse. Ink works, watercolours and a modest print output also appear.
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