ILLUSTRATED:
Chu Teh-chun, Cercle d'Art, Paris, 1993, color illustrated, no. 99, pp. 170-171
Chu Teh-Chun, Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris, 2000, color illustrated, pp. 170-171
Chu Teh-chun 1987-2000, Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, 2000, color illustrated, p. 49

Chu Teh-chun’s paintings are always full of brightly-colored light – sometimes exuding energy, sometimes beautiful and evocative – which encourages us to appreciate the power of nature and stimulates our emotions. The pain and misery of human existence, struggles and wounds, rarely appear in Chu’s work. Instead, Chu’s canvases, with their swirls of light and color, depict the glorious vistas and bright light that one sees after crossing over countless mountains and rivers, reflecting in every case the artist’s great soul and his kindly, tolerant heart.

Inspired by a visit to a retrospective exhibition of the work of Nicolas de Stael at the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1956, Chu Teh-chun began to create the non-figuration oil paintings that he had been planning to paint for some time. In these early abstract works, one can already see Chu’s masterly ability to represent the movement of light through effective use of color; red, orange and blue color tones set against a black background present a rich, detailed depiction of light. Just as Chu’s early abstract paintings took their subject matter from Paris street scenes, his later abstract works also often incorporated the spirit of landscape painting, evoking images of mountains and rivers. What distinguishes the later works is the way in which Chu’s growing fascination with nature led him, while on his travels, to explore the mysteries of the universe, and to try to capture the essence of the light that travels to us from the far reaches of the cosmos. During an interview with art critic Chu Ko (Yuan Teh-hsing) in 1988, Chu Teh-chun described his creative process as follows: “When I am painting, I am always drawing on my experiences when traveling at different times over the course of my life. Some paintings are the result of a sudden, irresistible impulse; sometimes, a lot of time has elapsed, and I may even have thought that I had forgotten the memories of that journey, but then, standing in front of the canvas, it all comes flooding back. Regardless of whether I am inspired directly by the beauty of the scenery, or whether the inspiration comes from some deeply-buried internal memory, whenever I stand before the canvas, the emotions start to well up.” (Tsu Wei, “Biography of Chu Teh-chun,” Taipei: Hoke Art Publishing Co., Ltd., August 2003, pp. 195 – 196).

Chu Teh-chun’s father was a passionate calligraphy and Chinese ink and wash paintings collector . Under his father’s tutelage, Chu practiced copying the stele inscriptions of the famous calligraphers of the past, and thus he developed a deep grounding in the calligraphy art. Although Chu’s studies at the Hangzhou School of Fine Arts mainly focused on oil painting, he also studied ink and wash painting under teachers such as Pan Tian Shou. After arriving in Paris, Chu Teh-chun cast off the shackles of figurative painting and embraced the freedom of abstract art; he integrated the approach to art that he had developed through calligraphy and ink and wash painting into oil painting, creating his own unique style. In Paris, the days are short in winter; Chu Teh-chun, who preferred to create his oil paintings in conditions of natural daylight, would often switch to producing ink and wash paintings in the evening once it got dark outside, and from the 1970s onwards, he also produced a considerable amount of calligraphy. Years of practice had enabled Chu to acquire a mastery of both line and ink-tone. His early abstract paintings are full of strong, powerful lines, reflecting the influence of calligraphy on his art. As Chu’s artistic career progressed, and lines began to meld into color, the soft warmth of ink and wash painting techniques began more obvious in his colorful oil paintings. The flowing, inter-penetrating colors had a cloudy quality to them reminiscent of the ink used in ink and wash painting, enabling Chu to produce a dense, layered effect in his works. This can be seen in “Matiere Dominee,” which Chu painted in 1992, and in which Chu succeeds in transforming the thick, gluey nature of oils into something light and flowing, so that even the darkest of colors have a magical freshness and energy to them.

Chu Teh-chun was particularly skilled at using the contrast between light and dark to depict the radiant beauty of light. “Matiere Dominee” is an outstanding example of this skill. In this painting, the greenish black and dark blue seem to flow down from the upper left hand corner of the picture, like waves striking the shore, spreading out over almost the whole canvas. At the sides of the painting, rays of light shine through from the unknown direction, bringing “daylight” into the scene; the contrast with this light makes the blue and green tones in the center of the canvas seem even darker and more powerful. The colors somehow reflect off one another, with the bright radiance flashing between them, creating a vivid beauty that is full of life and energy. Within the yellow corona at the bottom left-hand corner of the painting, fragmented patches of color and colored lines “leap about” energetically with a vivacity that seems almost magical, echoing the powerful red light on the other side of the canvas. The carefully thought-out composition has the light and the colors touching one another, in an apparently chaotic, violent manner, and yet at the same time they combine to form a harmonious, sweeping “symphony” of perfection. Here, the power of nature is transformed into a dance of light and color which exudes an infectious appeal to the human heart. As the title “Matiere Dominee” suggests, although the painting may be abstract, what it portrays is the very real pulse of nature that throbs at the universe.