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
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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.
Ding Xiongquan, Cat Women and the poets
Ting was the youngest of four sons of a family that owned factories making boxes in Wuxi. His Chinese name is Ding Xiongquan, sometimes romanised Ting Hsiung-ch'uan, and a work may be catalogued under either. In New York he worked at first as an abstract painter, and the figurative style of women, flowers and animals in broad areas of colour laid on with a Chinese brush took shape in the 1970s; he called the women Cat Women.
He wrote thirteen books, among them All in My Head with Roland Topor in 1974, and worked with the poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. Louis Stern showed his recent works on rice paper in Beverly Hills in 1990, Gallery Delaive in Amsterdam holds a large collection of his paintings, and his work is in the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Tate and the Hong Kong Museum of Art.
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.
