PROVENANCE:
Private collection, France

ILLUSTRATED:
Walasse Ting: Red Mouth, Toppan Printing Co. Ltd., Hong Kong, 1977, color illustrated

Miss World was created in the summer of 1975, belong the French important private collection. It is Walasse Ting's second Miss World appeared in the international auction market. Painting size attains to 300 F, with the composition full of bold, passion and fresh emotions, completely beyond artist's other works. Beautiful figur es from different states show their charming body with sultry posture to the audience. Such an enchanting magnificent painting, it is a unique master piece of the artist.

Ting loves both women and drawing more than his own life. Miss World belongs to the most important painting series, there are only three artworks of this series had been showed in public. Their length are all over 2 or 3 meters. 1970s is Ting's creation pinnacle time, the colorful style with abandon crisscross both his abstraction and figuration style.

Ting's colors full of vitality as a vibrant posy in the summer. Following his abstract technic in 1960s, the spot image in center area of the picture, like fireworks displaying in the sky, stands out figures' pretty faces. Even more, it also like artist's stand-in showing his own romantic affairs with beauties to the audience.

Although, the figure amount in Miss World is less than another same named work which has the dimension over than 500 F and sold at Ravenel in 2015. But each figure's composition enlarge in the painting, so the audience could clearly catch every ladies' tender fascial expression and sexy posture. Like teasing their own lover, these pretties try to evoke the audience's excitement to r eact them with hug or kiss. As known as his pseudonym Flower Thief, Ting accurately describes every women with his drawing pen. It is hard to identify if there is a real model, but we always cheerfully throw ourselves to enjoy in Ting's fantastic world.

Born in China in 1929 (some say 1928) in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, Walasse Ting grew up in Shanghai. He began painting in the streets of the city from early childhood, and at one point entered the Shanghai College of Fine Arts for a brief period of study; however , his freedomloving and spontaneous character made him averse to the strictures of an academy education. Ting always prided himself in being selftaught, and believed in following his impulses and inspirations as the best way of creative self-actualization. He moved to Hong Kong in 1946, where he had a single-artist exhibition at the Hotel Cecil in 1952. After that, he went to Paris for six years, beginning his international journey of artistic adventure.

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 simultaneous exhibitions in Paris and Brussels, before moving on 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.

Beginning in the 1960s, New York's fast pace and futuristic feel inspired Ting's acrylic paint phase. From that point on, the artist's palette shifted towards bright and brilliant hues, with drip and splash painting becoming one of his preferred modes of color application. His style now combined a straightforward variety of abstract expressionism with the mottled tones and decorative patterns of Fauvism in the vein of Matisse, whose work was a dominant influence on Ting's artistic development.

Ting has lived and worked in numerous countries, and been part of many modern art movements. Add to this his broad firsthand experience and international outlook, and the fact that his work is cherished by collectors around the world, and you may begin to see why I bring up his name. Back i n 1977, Ting was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and today his work is found in the collections of many first-rate museums and galleries, including the San Francisco Modern Art Museum, New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, London's Tate Gallery, the Guimet Museum of Eastern Art in Paris, the Municipal Museum Amsterdam, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, and the Shanghai Art Museum.