EXHIBITED:

Solo Exhibition of Chu Teh-chun, The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, June 23 - July 10, 2007

ILLUSTRATED:

Solo Exhibition of Chu Teh-chun, Thin Chang Corporation, Taipei, 2007, color illustrated, p. 97



This painting is to be sold with a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

The painting style of Chu Teh-chun falls into 5 periods according to time: the period in Mainland China and Taiwan, the early period in Paris, 70s, 80s and late 90s. Among which, the early period in Paris was the key stage where his painting style changed from representationalism to tachism. To realize his long-cherished dream of studying in Paris, Chu Teh-chun went on a ship from Taiwan to France in 1955. In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was at its peak in the US and Europe. After arriving in Paris, Chu Teh-chun began to ponder about how to get loose from the restraint in artistic creation under the influence of the early post-impressionistic style. In 1956, the posthumous retrospective exhibition of Nicolas de Staël's work gave Chu Teh-chun a great shock. The passionate, bold and unrestrained painting style of this descendant of Russian nobility, who committed suicide one year before, changed freely between tangible and intangible, representational and non-representational, which just complied with the path that Chu Teh-chun had urgently pursued.

Therefore, it was in the same year when Chu Teh-chun began to try tachism, which made him feel free, and he used to have architecture and urban sceneries as his painting subjects. He simplified forms and structures with color fields and lines that looked confident and smooth. In 1958, his first solo exhibition was held in Paris, and Chu Teh-chun's smooth lines and composition got good appraisal from Le Monde, France's largest national newspaper. While in the same year, Chu Teh-chun participated in 'l'École de Paris' in an art gallery in Denmark planned by the well-acknowledged Galerie Legendre as a Far-East artist; 2 years later, Chu Teh-chun's works were also listed in an exhibition of '1960 l'École de Paris' held by the senior Gustave Charpentier in Paris, which laid his position among members of 'l'École de Paris'.

The "Fantasia" painted in 1958 for sale now is a classic painting in the early period of the artist. After simplifying touches and lines, he used large color fields and selected pure colors with connotations to interpret his observation and expression of the outside surroundings. Besides, the bold dark brown lines on the border of color fields have everything to do with traditional Chinese cultivation he received since he was a child. Hubert Juin, a French art critic as well as a critic for French Literature highly praised, "Chu Teh-chun has opened up another artistic field with his virtuosity". Morris Barnet, his another bosom friend and also the earliest agent, deemed that "Chu Teh-chun's field doesn't belong to classic perceptive; we might say that it is multi-dimensional...Flexible selection of colors and layout of small dices show the subtle changes of moving light. These paintings are both spaces and structures." Success is by no means a contingency. Chu Teh-chun has created a new painting space of the contemporary era, which we can see from his early works. By combining his own cultivation in Chinese calligraphy and riot and free style of western abstract art, the artist keeps creating new expressions of modern poetic sceneries, and such a spirit is absolutely admirable.