ILLUSTRATED:
Solo Exhibition of Chu Teh-chun, The Ueno Royal Museum (Catalogue), Tokyo; Thin Chang Corporation, Taipei, 2007, color illustrated, p. 208

Whether flowing or majestic, color and light in Chu Teh-chun’s paintings is always serene and peaceful, reflecting the artist’s great courage and tolerance. Devoting his life to calligraphy, Chu incorporated the strength of calligraphy into his abstract paintings in his early period, adopting dark and strong strokes. In the 1980s, he wove lines into light and shadow, harmonizing the canvas with splendid flowing color blocks. As seen in “Alentours verdoyants II”, blackish green, reddish brown, indigo, and bright orange boldly form crumbling rocks and breaking clouds, establishing a strikingly harmonious blend of contrasting dualities of light and shadow.

Chu’s abstract paintings often elicit natural landscape images to the viewer, especially this auction item “Alentours verdoyants II”, created in 1988. In this work, Chu transformed viscous oil paint into fluid calligraphic brush strokes. Even the darkest colors are bestowed with an ethereal lightness to create a majestic landscape in the artist’s mind. Amid the changing colors, across the lower part of the canvas spreads a vibrant and colorful light, splashed with color blocks and bright orange and light blue lines. If the dark sideline of the bottom of the canvas is a river bank, the main part of the canvas is the running water and the trees and stones in the mountains. If the bottom of the canvas is the skyline silhouetted by treetops, the upper part of the canvas is the mysterious fluidity of an immense universe as well as a flash of dazzling light. With ethereal lightness and flowing feeling, Chu establishes a landscape of intense complexity on the canvas. The flawless intermingling of colors, lines, light and shadow reveals the mysterious world created by Chu’s artistic mastery.