Ting Walasse

Walasse Ting (Chinese: 丁雄泉, 13 October 1929 – May 17, 2010) was a Chinese-American visual artist and poet. His colorful paintings have attracted critical admiration and a popular following. Common subjects include nude women and cats, birds and other animals.

He was born on 13 October 1929 in Shanghai, left China in 1946 and lived for a while in Hong Kong, then settled in Paris in 1952. There, he associated with artists such as Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, and Pierre Alechinsky, members of the avant-garde group CoBrA.

In 1957, he moved to the United States, and settled in New York where his work was influenced by pop art and abstract expressionism. He began primarily as an abstract artist, but the bulk of his work since the mid-1970s has been described as popular figuratism, with broad areas of color painted with a Chinese brush and acrylic paint.

He lived in Amsterdam in the 1990s, but regularly moved between there and New York.

He is the author of 13 books, including "All in my Head" (Walasse Ting & Roland Topor, 1974) and "One Cent Life" (Eberhard W. Kornfeld, 1964) a portfolio of 62 original lithographs by 28 artists, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Kiki Kogelnik, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, Asger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Claes Oldenburg, Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg and Sam Francis.

He won the Guggenheim Fellowship Award (for Drawing) in 1970.

His works are found in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Hong Kong Museum of Art, among others.

He was sometimes referred to by his Chinese name "丁雄泉" or its various romanizations: Ding Xiongquan or Ting Hsiung-ch'uan.

Ting died on May 17, 2010 at aged 80 in New York, US.