Invited by the Manufacture de Sèvres, CHU Teh-Chun began his work in winter 2007, he completed the last of the 58 vases two years later in January 2009. A few days later, victim of a stroke, he definitively stopped painting.

In celebrating the marriage of the arts of brush and fire, Chu Teh-Chun has revived the inner journey that led him to his native China. With his nervous and seismic stroke, he has abolished the boundaries between painting, ceramics and calligraphy. 

A daughter of earth and fire, ceramics has reached the rank of an artistic discipline in its own right in China, notably thanks to porcelain, the perfection of which, under the Southern Song (1127-1279), was soon to arouse covetousness and crystallize all fantasies…

It was precisely during his stay in Taipei, in the spring of 1998, that Chu Teh-Chun undertook this new practice, painting a series of large platters in the heart of a studio located in Ying-Ge. 

Twenty years later, thanks to his close and passionate collaboration with the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres, the artist was to reach new heights of virtuosity and refinement. 

Far from being anecdotal, this technique allows him to renew his pictorial language, by offering him to transpose on the convex or spherical surfaces of plates or vases an abstract and oneiric world of signs, sweeps, stripes or blots. 

Impregnated with Taoist spirituality, well versed in the latest achievements of lyrical abstraction, the artist revisits the exchanges forged between the Middle Kingdom and the West through three chromatic variations: the immaculate white of the kaolin from which the first porcelains were made, the “celestial blue” borrowed from China by the Manufacture de Sèvres, and the matte and shiny golds of the European royal tables. 

In less than two years, Chu Teh Chun created fifty-eight “vase-sculptures” of rare poetry with a brush that was both masterful and electric. Microcosms offered to contemplation, some of his inspired works entered the collections of the Guimet Museum in 2015. 

Like a magnificent return to his roots for this artist born in Baitou Zhen, “the village of the white earth”, renowned for its porcelain. 

Connaissance des Arts Special Issue – CHU TEH-CHUN – N°929/1 – Bérénice Geoffroy-Shneiter