Author: CHU TEH-CHUN 朱德群

Size: 92×73cm

Signed and dated: Painted in 1958

Estimate: 7,200,000 -9,000,000

Final Price: RMB 8,600,000

signed in Chinese and English, dated 1958 (on the reverse)
LITERATURE
2007 Great Form has No Shape Chu Teh-Chun Painting Exhibition / P97 / Taipei Xinchang Co.

EXHIBITED
2007 Great Form has No Shape-Chu Teh Chun’s Exhibition Ueno Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

NOTE
The item is held under the bonded status, for more details, please see the Notice on Auction of Bonded Lots.

In 1997, at the coronation ceremony of the academician of the Academy of art of the French Academy, Zhu Teh-chun said:‘I am a son of the Han family, but I have been pursuing the combination of western traditional colors and free forms in Western abstract paintings, and the Chinese spirit of harmony of yin and Yang into a new kind of painting.’ As one of the‘three swordsmen of France’, Zhu Teh-chun is famous for abstract oil painting in France, but he has always lived‘very Chinese’. Born in a scholarly family, Zhu Teh-chunn received a good family education when he was young. In his youth, he went to Hangzhou art college to learn painting systematically from famous teachers such as Lin Fengmian, Wu Dayu and Pan Tianshou. The painting foundation laid during the period of Hangzhou art college and the pursuit of integration between China and the West and artistic freedom advocated by teachers provide support for Zhu Teh-chun’s exploration of painting creation from concrete to abstract. After graduation, Zhu Teh-chun traveled to Paris to study, imbued himself with Western art ideas and gradually realized his own pursuit of painting. In 1997, he was elected a lifelong academician of the French Academy of art.
When Zhu Teh-chun first arrived in Paris, it was the period when European abstract painting occupied the mainstream of the painting world. At that time, the sharp sense, free attitude and visual effect of color strokes conveyed by abstract painting had a great impact on Zhu Teh-chun. He realized the differences between concrete abstract paintings, began to think about and explore the essence of painting, and devoted himself to the practice and exploration of abstract painting. The Fantasia (Lot 1124) , created in 1958, belongs to Zhu Teh-chun’s early abstract works. In the center of the picture are two groups of large-area black blocks, like two human shoulders, which are intertwined and wrapped by black lines. The black paint is both paint and material, with a dry texture effect. It is like digging deep valleys and gullies in the picture, emitting red magma and green and blue soil layers. The picture not only has a profound sense of space, but also has the rhythm of strokes. It is no longer constrained by the image of the object. It can only be seen that the vertical and horizontal color blocks are laid out, the color dots are hidden, and the noise is noisy. It jumps in the thin brown gray background, and draws a complex and diverse fantasy song with unrestrained joy and anger. Although Zhu Teh-chun’s early abstract style weakened the appearance of the object image, he could still see the visible traces. The strong contrast between colors and geometric composition were used to hint the momentum of tension, so that the picture was still full of fierce collisions in the sense of rules.
In his subsequent creation, Zhu Teh-chun regained the traditional Chinese ink painting and calligraphy techniques, and his creation was completely free of the constraints of composition. He changed the previous work from deep and heavy, and gradually moved from thick ink and heavy color to light and flowing. This piece of Enthusiastic Echo (Lot 1125) was created in the mature period of Zhu Teh-chun’s abstract style. The picture is mainly in black and yellow tones, using the halo dyeing method of thin oil paint. The whole shows the meaning of quickness and harmony, with a great sense of light. On the dark black background, a bright orange yellow, blue, white and red leaps in it. The strokes have both a sense of transparent air and a rapid turbulent flu. The light color jump is full of vigorous vitality. At the same time, it has both dramatic effects and dreamlike meanings. The Enthusiastic Echo (Lot 1125) is the boundless universe, a flickering strange light and a surging and majestic natural Vientiane. After his creation entered a mature period, Zhu Teh-chun’s understanding of light, darkness and light gradually conformed to the traditional Chinese cosmology. He said:‘Yin and Yang refer to darkness and light, which are actually light. What I want to express is light. My painting idea is the unity of heaven, earth and people.’ The combination of Chinese philosophy and Western light and color techniques forms the unique color effect in the work warm echo - what the artist describes is not objective images, nor external natural light and color, but integrates the traditional Chinese philosophy, showing time and space, daily and extraordinary, natural scenery and universe imagination as a more magnificent spiritual phenomenon.