CHU TEH-CHUN 1920-2014

Chu Teh-Chun, born in 1920 in Baitu Zhen in the Xian of Xiao, China, grew up in a family of doctors and collectors of Japanese calligraphy and painting. At 15 years old, he joined the National School of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. He used his free time to explore the traditional Chinese style and created more than 500 watercolors of the West’s lake. However, his school did not suggest traditional Chinese art’s classes, thus he had to study western’s painting.
During the Sino-Japanese War, Chu The-Chun was appointed professor at the Nanjing’s University. In 1942, he became full professor.
In 1950, he became professor at the Industrial School, architectural section, in Taipei, Taiwan.
In 1951, he became a faculty member in National Taiwan Normal University where he would teach western painting.
In 1955, the painter and his wife, Tung Chi-Chao, started a trip for Europe. They fell in love with Paris and decided to settle there.
As lyrical abstraction’s patriarch, especially in abstract landscaping, Chu Teh-Chun dawn notoriety in France at the end of the 1950s.
In 1964, his success kept extending itself with the Carnegie exhibition at the Pittsburg’s, Jerusalem’s and Athens’ Museum of Arts. He also contributed to the Sao Paulo Art Biennial in 1969.
In the middle of the 1970s, he reconnected with the Japanese calligraphy, his childhood dedication. In 1983, he was chosen to participate to the board of Hong Kong’s University. Thanks to it, he would be able to travel to Beijing where he would be invited to join the Chinese Artists Union. In his honor, the National History Museum of Taiwan organized his first retrospective exhibition.
In 1997, he was elected to be a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, in painting section.
The French Artistic Action Association (AFAA) at the Beaux-Arts Museum of Beijing, Honk Kong, Kaohsiung and Taipei organized another retrospective from 1997 to 1998.
In 2002, he realized La Symphonie Festive for Shanghai’s opera; the artwork was exposed in the opera’s hall.
Between 2006 and 2008, he began a new journey with the Sèvres national manufacture where he would discover a new material: Ceramics. He would fuse cultures with white Chinese porcelain base, Persian cobalt blue and traditional European gold with the additional of Song Dynasty patterns. He created 56 vases named “ De neige, d’or et d’azur” at the Guimet Museum in September 2009.
Chu Teh-Chun died in March 2014 in Paris, France.