When painter Walasse Ting fled communist-pressed Hong Kong for Paris in 1950, he had little money and few connections. But within five years, the son of a wealthy Jiangxi family was painting and had befriended the influential abstractionist Pierre Alechinsky, who was to become a lifelong friend.
By 1958, Ting - who chose his idiosyncratic English name out of emulation of painter Henri Matisse - had sold enough paintings in the galleries of Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam to move on to the pulsating hub of the international art world of his day, New York City. There he went on to establish a studio, start a family, work hand-in-hand with legends of the era such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and spend the bulk of his life and formidable career as an abstract painter, pop poet, brilliant colourist, erotic adventurer and expatriate Chinese artist - although no single label ever managed to stick to a man whose identity as an artist was always, to say the least, multivalent.
Preparation for Ting's first ever retrospective, From Heroic Expression to Resplendent Colour, at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, began before his death this year on May 17, which came after eight bed-ridden years following a brain haemorrhage in 2002.
Covering more than 50 years, the exhibition is the first to show the full breadth of Ting's stylistic development, as well as four never-before-seen 10-metre canvases - they are as breathtaking as they are large - that have spent most of the past 10 years rolled up in Ting's Amsterdam studio.
Private galleries in Taipei and Hong Kong are also mounting shows, including Hong Kong's Alisan Fine Arts (entitled I Love Flowers All My Life, until the end of the month) and SOKA Art Centre Taipei (titled The Floral Journey, until January 2).
'What he liked was youth, vibrancy, summer, spring,' says Guan Guan, a Taiwanese poet who became fast friends with Ting in the early 1970s. 'And when autumn came, he liked the autumn that wasn't autumn, the autumn with the flowers still blooming.'
