Created at a pivitol time in his acclaimed career, the year after his election into the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1997 as the first French artist of Chinese origin to be bestowed with the honour, Chu Teh-Chun’s Nuances de l'aube is a magical example of his ability to synthesise traditional Chinese painting styles with Western abstraction. One of the leading Chinese abstract artists of the 20th Century, Chu’s work continues to have an abiding influence on the artists of subsequent generations. He is considered amongst the greats of Chinese modern art, affectionately referred to as one of the ‘Three Musketeers’ of Chinese modernism along with his old friends and classmates from the National Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, Wu Guangzhong and Zao Wou-Ki.
Nuances de l'aube situates itself amongst Chu’s refined, luminous works of the 1990s and early 2000s that explore light at specific times of day and natural phenomena, such as Serin (1990), which conjures a cascading waterfall crashing into stillness, offered by Phillips Hong Kong in Association with Poly Auction, in the 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Day Sale in December 2020, which surpassed its original estimates. Such works employ similar motifs, including misty planes, dynamic clashing brushstrokes and spheres of phosphorescent light, depicted with an overall lightness and delicacy of hand, which are distinctive of his later works.
In Nuances de l’aube, the title of which translates to “shades of dawn”, Chu masterfully captures the breaking light of dawn, piercing through the depths of darkness with flaming yellow and orange hues. As the sky slowly awakens from its slumber, orbs of luminous greens and blues puncture through the misty atmosphere, bright pigments clashing with the dark blacks and fighting for dominance at this early time of day. The sky is alive with twinkling, kaleidoscopic lights, seemingly emanating from the horizontal flash of luminescence that splits the composition in two with a dazzling clarity that contrasts with the surrounding feathery haze of black and blue oil wash.
Although Chu removes a distinct horizon line, we sense the rising sun in the obscure distance, perforating the palpable mist that engulfs the landscape of Chu’s imagination, which in turn threatens to submerge the viewer who is situated in the midst of the painting. Further, there is a discernible reflection in the composition of Nuances de l’aube, with the bottom of the canvas almost mirroring the upper half, suggestive of the sun rising over a body of water, perhaps a river, reflecting and refracting the streams of light on its shadowy, glass-like surface.
“Chu Teh-Chun paints movements, clashes amalgams and, in so doing, he prolongs the breathlessness of time and sometimes precedes it. He swells the rhythms, shakes them up, varies them, and gashes them with signs like paths running through space at a gentle misty dawn or in the flaming colours of a sunset. But there are always in his paintings these sky blues or turquoise, soft pinks, golden yellows, and bursts of white which, skillfully distributed, fight dark forces and express the freshness and beauty of the world in the middle of the night.”
— Pierre Cabanne
Chu is almost unsurpassed in his exquisite handling of light, and evocation of a specific time of day. Indeed, we can almost feel the early morning dew on our skin, smell the freshness of the crisp air and hear the first chirps of birdsong. The eye is drawn from the outer edge of the canvas to its middle, from coldness to warmth, from isolation to comfort. Chu excellently achieves the effect of chiaroscuro, the contrast of light and dark, having been struck by the work of Rembrandt after attending a commemorative exhibition for the famous Dutch artist in the Netherlands in 1970. This prompted a change in Chu’s abstract works, embracing the polarities of brightness and shade, and producing an incandescent glow that radiates from his canvas works. Light and shadow become the yin and yang of his oeuvre, opposite yet strong complementary forces.
“The artist absorbs what he sees in nature and refines it in his mind, and it is the power of the artist’s imagination, his sensibility, and his inner character that are revealed on the canvas. This is where the concepts behind Chinese painting and abstract painting very neatly come together.”
— Chu Teh-Chun
Chu is able to capture the magnificence of nature in his works, his rapid ascending and descending brushstrokes evoking the essence of jagged mountains and recalling the lyrical ink paintings of the Chinese Northern Song Dynasty. The artist paints real and imagined landscapes, typically executed in his studio but inspired by his extensive travels, dating back to his extraordinary 4,000 kilometre exodus in-land after the declaration of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Looking at Nuances de l’aube, the viewer can feel the artist’s harmonious communion with nature, reflecting the spirit of China’s meandering rivers, cascading waterfalls, dramatic mists and mountainous landscapes, from the steep and rugged beauty of the Chongqing countryside where he taught from 1941, to the rolling hills of the Taiwanese landscape, where he was a professor at the National Taiwan Normal University from 1948 until his departure to Paris in 1955.
Discovering the highly abstract landscape paintings of Nicolas de Staël in 1956 at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, Chu reached a pivotal turning point in his career, turning towards lyrical abstraction and use of colour as means to represent the divine essence of nature and the landscapes that he had, and was yet to encounter. Nuances de l’aube is the culmination of decades of artistic development, no longer as heavily impastoed as his early abstract landscapes of the 1960s and 1970s, but an iridescent synthesis of the landscapes and techniques that consumed his mind.