The Chinese painter Chu Teh-Chun has long been a leading figure in contemporary painting on the art market and a major figure in the history of art. Represented both in national museums and galleries and at public auctions in the largest auction houses, Chu Teh-Chun is one of the Chinese painters whose works of art still attract collectors. Great lovers of modern and contemporary Asian paintings of the 20th century, as well as art experts, recognize in Chu Teh-Chun a master of calligraphy. He knew how to use his brushes at the crossroads of Asian art and Western contemporary art, paying homage to these influences both with paintings and art objects.
Chu Teh-Chun was born in 1920 in Northern China. He studied at the Hangzhou School of Fine Arts where he took lessons from Lin Fengmian from 1935. From the age of twenty, Chu Tech-Chun became a teacher and taught successively in various Chinese institutions. In 1955, he leaves for Europe and settles in France; he travels through different countries such as Spain where he discovers the expressive paintings of Goya and El Greco which mark him deeply. In 1958, the discovery of Nicolas de Staël’s abstraction, during a retrospective exhibition devoted to the painter, was a revelation for Chu Tech-Chun, who then chose to abandon figurative painting in order to devote himself to the elaboration of an abstract artistic form, based on colour and sensations. This period also coincides with the first Parisian successes of the Chinese artist, whose first exhibition was organised by the Galerie du Haut-Pavé. Chu Tech-Chun’s painting, often assimilated to the current of lyrical abstraction, is the result of a skilful hybridization between Chinese and Western trends. The artist has been able to draw inspiration from the traditional Chinese landscape, the noble and classical genre par excellence of the national culture, and to invest it personally by elaborating a system of visual and sensory references on the canvas. The titles of his works evoke the unbreakable link that Chu Teh-Chun’s art maintains with nature, which is “an imaginary analogy, i.e. a certain uncontrolled feeling that expresses a profound agreement with the contradictory forces that govern the universe” according to Patrick-Gilles Persin.
The auction house Aguttes Commissaire-priseur has forged a solid reputation for advising, appraising, developing, buying and selling the works of Chu Teh-Chun. Indeed, Charlotte Reynier-Aguttes, head of the Modern and Contemporary Paintings department, has grasped the power of this artist. She therefore wished to pay tribute to him by organizing beautiful exhibitions followed by lively bidding battles. Recognized for its expertise on the works of Chu Teh-Chun, the Aguttes Commissaire-priseur study has thus presented since 2009 in its Auction House in Neuilly-sur-Seine more than twenty paintings by the painter, thus meeting the growing demand of European and Asian collectors. The works of Chu Teh-Chun sold by Aguttes have achieved important results, for example in 2014 an oil on canvas entitled Au Crépuscule de 1979 (81 x 60 cm – 31 7/8 x 23 2/3 in.) sold for €357,000.
