Chu Teh-Chun - In Nebula

Monograph published to coincide with the retrospective exhibition by Chu Teh-Chun (1920-2014) entitled "In Nebula", presented at the 60th Venice Biennale of International Art, Fondazione Giorgio Cini (20 April - 30 June 2024).

Born in China into a family of art lovers, Chu Teh-Chun trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. Then came the Second Sino-Japanese war, family tragedy, the loss of nearly all his early work, and finally, exile-to Taiwan in 1949, then, in 1955, to Paris, where he settled.

This peaceful home witnessed the emergence of his tortured abstraction, devoid of obvious geometry, in which polychrome nebulae and maelstroms clash with violent chiaroscuro effects. Atmospheric, impossible to scale, each painting is an arena into which vision is projected and submerged amid a loss of spatial and semantic bearings.

Steeped in painting both classical and modern, Asian and Western, Chu's art recreates the memory of a landscape, the dynamic essence of gesture, and the brilliance of light. This study, by placing his work in its context, using parallels, analogies, and other resonances, focuses on the singularity of his approach to abstraction, underpinned by the organic logic of the living world, by natural phenomena, forms, forces, and by their eruptive fluidity and cosmogonic revolutions.

For many years, Chu remained a somewhat marginal figure, perhaps because of his reserved personality and his principled rejection of commercial strategies.