Walasse Ting valuation
Poured acrylic on rice paper — women, parrots, cats and horses in colours that shout.
Walasse Ting was born in Wuxi in 1928, grew up in Shanghai, moved to Paris in 1952 where he fell in with the CoBrA painters, and settled in New York in 1957.
What a work by Walasse Ting is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Walasse Ting was born in Wuxi in 1928, grew up in Shanghai, moved to Paris in 1952 where he fell in with the CoBrA painters, and settled in New York in 1957. He published 1 Cent Life in 1964, a book of his own poems illustrated by twenty-eight artists including Warhol, Lichtenstein and Appel, which is now a landmark of the period. His own mature work poured brilliant fluorescent acrylic onto absorbent rice paper — women with fans, parrots, cats, horses and flowers, painted fast, with the colour bleeding into the fibre. He died in New York in 2010.
A market principally in Hong Kong, Taiwan and New York, where his prices have risen substantially. Acrylic and ink on rice paper is the characteristic medium and it is the central condition issue: the paper is thin and absorbent, the fluorescent pigments fade badly under light, and neither can be remedied — a faded Ting is worth a fraction of a fresh one. Oils on canvas are scarcer. There is a substantial print output, and 1 Cent Life copies are collected separately, valued on completeness and condition.
Hong Kong, 1 Cent Life and Amsterdam
Ting briefly studied at the Shanghai College of Fine Arts and moved to Hong Kong in 1951 before going on to Paris, where he knew Appel, Jorn and Alechinsky. In 1962 he married the artist Natalie Lipton, and the family lived in the Westbeth Artists Community in New York. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship for drawing in 1970.
1 Cent Life, published by Eberhard W. Kornfeld in 1964, contains 62 original lithographs by 28 artists, among them Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, Rosenquist and Jorn, so completeness is the first thing to check in a copy. From the mid-1980s he had a studio in Amsterdam and settled there in 2001. A stroke in 2002 ended his working life, so a work dated after that year is not his.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
