Generally speaking, George Chann’s artistic development reveals three styles. The first of these, and the one with the strongest Eastern character, is “textual paintings” completed from the 1950s through the early 1960s, This type of painting featured scripting of symbols based directly on Chinese characters, bolstered by the expression of various brushstrokes, and textural qualities. Exhibiting Chann’s familiarity and skill with painting materials, more importantly it played out his artistic ambition to marry textural imagery with historical imagination. In this way, he placed Chinese characters of different styles (such as script, running script, block style, etc.) together with different materials (including carvings, rubbings, talismanic writings, images of birds and critters, blood writing, soiled walls, fragments from classic books, and discarded paper). The aesthetic intent of these works was to achieve a balanced combination of formal visual components and textural physical patterns, to effectively tap the charm and tension inherent in each material and the myriad associations triggered by various written characters and symbols.

Chann’s later abstract paintings demonstrate his keen sense of color and capacity for creating order out of chaos, while at the same time proving the meticulous yet nevertheless lyrical artistic qualities of a pure abstract painter. By this time, written words and symbols are no longer present, and the “writing” has become purer, freer, and more organic. In constant streams, or broken fragments, or perhaps overlapping and intermingling, diaphanous white lines wending through and around blasts of color, the complete communion of patches of color and shimmering lines, sing together like notes and melody. Despite their garnished richness, devoid of all fire, unlike the raw drive of Pollack’s works their unique character rewards repeated viewing. (J.J. Shih, George Chann, Lin & Keng Gallery Inc., Taipei, 2005, p. 22)