The Chinese-American artist Walasse Ting created many great works during his long and celebrated artistic life. He was born in Wuxi, China, and grew up in Shanghai. He studied at Shanghai Academy of Art. Later, he traveled overseas to start artistic career, which lasted over a decade.

Ting soon became good friends with several members of the art group CoBrA, which flourished in Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s, finding the group's style and outlook congenial to his own nature. During this period, he held exhibitions in Paris and Brussels simultaneously, before moving to New York in 1958. There he found himself on the cusp of the abstract-expressionist movement, and later became one of the first people to recognize the unique talents of Andy Warhol - Ting himself was also closely associated with the pop art movement. His unconventional character, both debonair and emotional, made the CoBrA group with its focus on free selfexpression his natural playground, while abstract expressionism allowed him to give free rein to his penchant for sublimating his moods via the distinctive dots, lines, planes, colors, shapes and compositions that make up the basic vocabulary of his art. Finally, the everyday, contemporary-reality allure of pop art chimed well with Ting's affinity for striking images with mass appeal.

Created in 1969, "The Sweet Milky Way" is an epitome of the artist's experiments with style. Heavily influenced by Jackson Pollock, the canvas is covered by seemingly random splashes of oil paint. The large areas of brilliant yellow and rose red with some magenta and apple green in between clearly manifest the artist's whimsical and carefree nature.