PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Asia

THE MAGNIFICENT GLORY OF THE GOLDEN ERA

This overview of Chu Teh-chun’s artwork is akin to appreciating a lyrical epic. The methods of textural painting often gives the viewers a feeling of spiritual energy. The most appropriate phrase for describing his artworks is “vivid artistic conception”. He was constantly transforming and refining his methods and was full of an almost supernatural enthusiasm. Regarding the various interpretations of his art as well as his artistic reproduction of nature, it has been pointed out that some of his transformations went beyond an objective rendition of the landscape but rather had become a highly subjective and poetic expression instead. Via the transition from the specific to the abstract, he has created a portrayal of the intellectual realizations he had accumulated throughout his life.

Born in a time of turmoil and cultural flows, Chu Teh-chun had transitioned from a traditional Chinese environment to a modern European aesthetic. Beginning in the 1980s, Chu Teh-chun began employing oriental charm as a basis for complementing features of Western artistic expression. The brushstrokes and contours of his art are reminiscent of the forms found in Chinese calligraphy. Xie Hun, an art historian from the Southern Qi Dynasty, describes in his seminal work, “The Record of the Classification of Old Painters”, the Six principles of Chinese painting: spirit resonance, bone method, correspondence to the object, suitability to type, division and planning and transmission by copying. One can easily see that the first two principles, spirit resonance and the bone method, are incorporated in Chu Teh-chun’s artworks.

BEYOND THE FINITE

This piece, known as Sans titre, was created by Chu Teh-chun in 1983. Witnessing the masterly brush’s color configuration is like listening to the melody of a great piece of music. The rhythm and cadence are intricately interwoven like a dance. The thickness of the contours are staggered, layered and juxtaposed in the picture, forming a harmonious and ambient atmosphere. The picture with the warm colors is like an impassioned and gentle symphony. Moreover, the spirit of the Chinese style brush strokes is seen in both the large and small dots. Through this, the art manifests a bright and ephemeral poetic spirit. Wu Guang-zhong, the peer in Hangzhou School of Fine Arts, also commented that each one of Chu’s paintings are like kinetic harmonies, the beauty of rhythm is unified in harmonic colors, it’s like “To watch others dance before a crystal, looks intense but also totally silent, as if unconstrained strengths were all melted in one placid beauty.”

In addition to embodying the representation of oriental culture, Chu Teh-chun had also liberated his artistic forms from the confines of specific matters, manifesting in a penetration of magnificent grandeur. Beyond just representing the unique symbolism and characteristics of music among the Chinese literati, Chu Teh-chun’s art had another manifestation as well: a unique esoteric motif that is repeatedly reflected in his works, namely a meditation on the vastness and boundlessness of the universe. Through this detached sentimental style, he conveys his esteem for the beauty of nature. The overall picture was particularly effective at capturing and conveying the feeling and texture of air. In Chu Teh-chun’s paintings, he had rearranged the scenery that he witnesses. Whether it is the lighting of a portrait or the oriental heritage which permeates the atmosphere, he had broken the principles of conventional judgment one step at a time. His one-of-a-kind artistic forms are an ingenious fusion of Eastern and Western influences. He uses an abstract naturalistic approach to allow these unique cultural sources to blend with each other, preserving their positive attributes while discarding their superfluous elements. It is as so though the horizon were a surging, radiating and magnificent flower that bloomed with unprecedented