PRINTPROVENANCE:
Collection of Dennis Hwang, New York (a wedding gift from the artist in 1983)
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Do You Like Cool Breeze?
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1983 Acrylic on canvas 126 x 176 cm Signed on the reverse Walasse Ting, titled Do You Like Cool Breeze?, inscribed to Dennis Hwang Best Wishes all in English and dated 083 |
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Estimate
1,600,000 - 2,200,000 6,160,000 - 8,470,000 203,800 - 280,300
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Sold Price
1,920,000 7,384,615 247,423
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Collection of Dennis Hwang, New York (a wedding gift from the artist in 1983)
Catalogue Note:
Female figures, flowers, birds and cats constitute the most common themes in the art of Walasse Ting. His work is characterized by the complete lack of constraint with which he switches between colors, techniques and materials. Ting, who boasted of his success as "The Flower Pirate", was constantly searching for beauty, whether in women or in flowers. He excelled at depicting the soft, attractive, alluring side of women, while adding cats, flowers and birds to the pictures to emphasize their adorableness.
"Do You Like Cool Breeze" was painted in 1983, as a wedding gift for Ting's friend and fellow artist Dennis Hwang. A semi-nude woman in blue lies in elegant repose amidst flowers. This is a work in the classic Walasse Ting style, with simple, precise brushstrokes outlining the woman's form; the single-color, even-application technique used in traditional Chinese woodcuts has been employed with great effect in depicting the female figure. Large patches of evenly-spread blue and pink form the woman's attractive body, with simple linear brushstrokes giving a sense of elegant beauty to the representation of her buttocks. The woman's alluring pose brings to mind Titian's paintings of Venetian ladies. In this painting, Walasse Ting succeeds in creating a perfect fusion of traditional Chinese single-color, even-application woodblock printing technique and the bold use of color that characterizes Western modernism.
Walasse Ting once said that "Whenever I see an attractive woman or a beautiful flower, it always inspires an elusive feeling of sensitivity. Seeing them fills me with energy and vitality, gives me feelings that I usually do not experience, and makes me feel as though I have been reborn. I use a large number of different color tones to let this feeling of energy and love explode on the canvas. I have been painting in oils for 50 years now. Throughout this time, what I have been seeking to express is a sense of purity and freshness. The progression from beauty to love to purity is like the rebirth that is spring." In his own unique way, Walasse Ting used this painting to send a fresh "spring breeze" wafting towards the newly-married friend to whom this painting was presented.