ILLUSTRATED
Walasse Ting - Love, Affairs, Woman-Woman, Lung Men ArtGallery; Apollo Gallery; Asia Art Center, Taipei, 1992, colorillustrated, p. 1, no. 001,

Walasse Ting's painting style is daring and unruly. Widely known for its gorgeous palettes, his work overflows in swelling waves of spring colour that reflects the artist's dazzling life. His passionate and unrestrained personality also shines through in his paintings and poems alike. With a fondness for a happy, erotic scene that extols people's emotional cravings and the beauty of their mundane lives, apart from women, fine wine and feasting dining take a central role in Walasse Ting's work and life. Walasse Ting moved to Paris and later New York, where he was freed from the constraints of traditional thinking and could instead ingrain himself in the local trends of art and culture. This led to the development of his own unique, unaffected style of freeform painting.

With a grounded and abundantly imaginative approach to painting, Walasse Ting chose to forgo the use of traditional features of deep, high and sprawling compositional elements, even blank space, and replace it all with spatial compositions marked by filled, flat, and compact scenes bursting with flowers in bloom. The whole canvas could present a solid, steady, and fresh visual tension with a touch of soft, glowing flowers. That is, the object in the work would be directed by the artist's subjective consciousness, made to transcend the images that came from naturally generated ideas, and to better uncover the deep inner layers of the spirit. Hence, colours would be brought to flowers as if caught in a dream being steered by an intensely subconscious book, where all the words have been reworked as extraordinary phrases.

A quadriptych made in the late-1980s, Lady is a rare multi-piece work by Walasse Ting. Even less commonly seen from the artist is a work of this large of a scale on rice paper, exemplary of his lateperiod practice. The flowers and fruits at the centre of this still life are standard fare in the traditions of both China and the West but Walasse Ting added to this the women, horses, parrots, and other symbolic elements that he so adored. The exaggerated contrasts of the colours and the enthusiastic structure of the lines reflect the wild illogic of the artist's life. The revelry seen on the canvas is uninhibited, youthful, flowing like words spoken to the heart's content and elation. The smooth fusion of Chinese and Western painting styles in Lady is a tactful embodiment of Walasse Ting's fervently expressive methods and unique artistic appeal. It is an exceptional work, and it shows how Walasse Ting, in comparison to other Chinese artists, gave a greater weight to his own emotions and desires. The colours are gorgeous, emitting the vital energy of life lived to the fullest.