A Painting by Chu-Teh-chun from 1984 Never Before Seen on the Art Market
Acquired from the artist’s studio in 1985, this large canvas epitomizes Chu Teh-chun’s mature period, when his depictions of nature reveal their most beautiful flights of color.
Estimate: €80,000/120,000
The tumultuous beauty of nature imposes itself on our eyes. We find ourselves immersed in cloud curls, morning mists, buffeted by wind. Atmospheric elements animate Chu Teh-chun‘s paintings. Already during his formative years, mentored by such great artists as Pan Tianshou, Zhang Guang and Li Kuchan at the Hangzhou Fine Arts School, he understood the need to “liberate the transcendent nature within you”. His interior landscapes are focused on capturing light and retranscribing the primordial rhythm of life. With this in mind, colors and lines work together. Irisation Saturation is a perfectly masterful example. Painted in 1984, the painting was acquired the following year from the painter’s studio and has remained in the same collection ever since. After an early career marked by dark canvases influenced by Nicolas de Staël, in the 1970s the painter developed a lyrical expression in works in which orange tones came to the fore. But it was the following decade that marked the apogee of his style, with a notable increase in the width of his paintings and the appearance of dominant green and blue hues, in landscapes where the light comes from behind the composition and pierces the material. This quest for depth is reinforced by contrasts between warm and cold tones, transparency effects and superimpositions. An impression of floating emanates from the canvas, while the light, by piercing the material, pushes color saturation to its maximum and recreates atmospheric iridescence, like a swirling rainbow.
Painted in 1984, the painting was acquired the following year from the painter’s studio and has remained in the same collection ever since.
To achieve this degree of mastery and pictorial effect, Chu Teh-chun perfected a technique based on the application of broad strokes of diluted paint, using a brush up to 25 cm/ nearly 10 inches wide. Once dry, these brushstrokes create subtle gradations, evoking air humidity and steam. His art is thus a skilful balance between gestural abstraction and a rhythmic structure served by a thoughtful method. Chu Teh-chun is thus in the direct line of traditional Chinese painters. In fact, it was following a new rapprochement with his country that his style evolved. A reunion with his former teacher Lin Fengmian in Paris in 1979 rekindled ties, and in 1983 he set off on a trip to Beijing. He rediscovered the landscapes that nourished his imagination and the masters who had always moved him, with their philosophy of emptiness and fullness, their representation of nature through rhythms and flows. Long before Western abstraction, in fact, the ancestral technique of xieyi (“writing the idea”) is made up of expressive, spontaneous brushstrokes, with intention taking precedence over form. This aesthetic is imbued with poetry, painting and Taoist philosophy, arts intimately linked and practiced by Wang Wei (701-761), whose landscapes and colors, as well as his unique treatment of clouds and their multiple variations, have always inspired Chu Teh-chun. The 8th-century scholar-painter invited contemplation with these words: “Walk to the place where the spring dries up and wait, seated, for the clouds to rise.”
Tableaux contemporains : fonds d’atelier Simon de Cardaillac
Thursday 19 June 2025 – 14:00 (CEST)
16, avenue de Lyon – 03200 Vichy
Vichy Enchères
