Gouache No. 4

For nearly fifty years, the Paris-based Chinese master Chu Teh-Chun has perfected a painting style that hovers between natural imagery and abstraction.

Chu attended the art academy of Hangzhou, which was the first Chinese art school to offer courses in western styles and painting materials. He learned to utilize rich colors not usually seen in classic Chinese painting and worked for a time in the foreign medium of oil. Even as he pursued western artistic techniques, Chu was deeply inspired by the natural beauty of the China’s great Yangzi River and especially intrigued by the rapport with nature he sensed in the landscape paintings in monochrome brush-and-ink of Song dynasty (960–1127) masters.

Chu began this protracted visual meditation—the necessity of "vision" over "representation" that is an artistic thread in both traditional Chinese and modern western painting—at the end of the 1950s, when he permanently relocated to France. There, he encountered the work of new generation of expressionistic painters and quickly abandoned his figurative style for an abstraction of sweeping gestures and non-objective shapes.

These varied influences first came together in such works as Gouache No. 4, in which Chu mixed degrees of naturalism, intuition, and spontaneity in colorful compositions utilizing bold, calligraphic brushstrokes. His marks suggest but do not describe actual landscape features or other natural forms.