Illustrated:

From the 1980's to the 1990's, Chu The chun's oil paintings have been moving closer and closer to the Chinese tradition. As mentioned above, his lines, dots, and broad strokes have developed a close relationship to Chinese calligraphy and painting. Some of his works in the form of diptych and triptych compositions seem to come close to the Chinese handscroll format. The titles of some of his paintings, such as "Renewal of the Earth" "Blue Cosmos" "Primordial World" "After the Rain" "Clearing" and "Mid-winter" seem to suggest some flavor of traditional Chinese landscape painting. Others, such as "Ecstasy" "Strong and Weak" "Harmony" and "Brightness of Thought" "Challenge of Darkness" and "Light After Disaster" reflect his own inner spirit. All there seem to be closely related to the Chinese traditional artistic tradition which always pays close attention to all the changes in nature and the universe, in order to search, through the relationship between man and nature, for the philosophical meaning of human life, as a way to attain a realization as the highest expression of Chinese art. As a result, in his works, his brushwork, his colors, and his compositions sometimes remind one of Chinese bird and flowers painting, or some landscapes, or some spirited expression of calligraphy. All there are the culmination of Chu The-chun's several decades of experiences, from Hangzhou to Taipei and to Paris, from Lin Fenfmien, Wu Dayu, to Cezanne, Renbrandt, and to Picasso, Matisse, and to Nicolas de stael, Hartung, Soulages, and Mathieu, constantly absorbing therir essence and attaining a synthesis of their art and eventually vringing in elements of Chinese bird and flower painting, landscapes, and calligraphy. All there have been blended into his own personl style, establishing himself a position in both Chinese and Western art history. This is Chu's great achievement.

Chu The-chun's art has maintained a deep relationship with the traditional of Chinese Art. To observe this we can look at his monochrome ink painting in particular. Nowadays, whether in the mainland or in Taiwan, almost all the colleges and departments of Fine Art have separate departments for traditional painting and oil painting, which do not mix. After Chu entered the National Academy he remained on the path of Western painting. However, during his moves from Mainland China to Taiwan and then to Paris, no matter that he continued working in oil, or how much his work technically resemble Western oil painting, many critics were still able to easily point out that the similarity of feeling and expression between Chu's painting and the flavor of Chinese traditional painting was still very profound. Chu himself also makes this point clear in his ink painting. He originally used a Chinese brush on blotting paper, but in recent years he has been working on Chinese paper, an obvious reflection of his discovery of the similarities between his work and traditional Chinese painting. Generally speaking, the style of his ink painting is completely identical with his oil painting.

In his ink paintings Chu used two main techniques, the first of which consists of large and small dots. These dots use ink and water; the water is applied to the center of the ink dots causing the ink to spread, a technique is known in Chinese as "Water-broken-ink."This technique is very similar to that used by the Qing dynasty painter Badashanren(Zhu Da) in his painting of lotus leaves. The edges of all of these large dots are darker and the centers are lighter. These dots show many variations and a wide range of dark and light tones. In contrast to the dots Chu's other principal technique used primarily lines. In this technique Chu uses a Chinese brush loaded with ink tones that range from light to dark, and brush strokes that very in width and in movement, making the whole picture a dynamic abstract composition. There ink paintings can been seen as a kind of sketching; some look like mountains, water, trees and rocks, others like flowers, vegetables and fruits. But the style of all of them is still an abstract, simplified version of his oil painting technique. This case in point shows that Chu built a bridge between oil painting and ink painting which he traversed very freely, feeling no great difference between the two. In other words, before this many people realized that there was a wide gap between Chinese painting and Western painting; however, in Chu's painting this gap had already been closed and had completely disappeared. He was able to link up these two traditional systems.