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Yu Tian Cheu was born
in 1935, Huizhou, Canton province, China, and grew up in Singapore.
At 27 in 1962, Cheu took the bold step to embark for New York City
to further his study of art.
Cheu remembers vividly
that the artists who impressed him most from the very outset and
who were subsequently to influence his painting were C└zanne, Matisse,
Picasso and, among the American contemporaries, Jackson Pollock.
His early works were strongly
structural in nature and took the form of abstract collages executed
in oil and textile fragments derived randomly from used garments.
To ensure that the colors were of his own creation and thus played
a crucial role in the overall composition, he transformed some of
the colors on the fragments with pigments. This approach gave him
a distinctive advantage: it afforded him considerable room for mobility
and variety during the process of painting.
Color made an important
contribution to his paintings, too. Based neither on any known color
theories nor on colors that served a function, Cheu's colors sprang
mysteriously from his own gut feelings. Professor Sidney Gross,
who was Cheu's painting tutor at the Art Students' League, was impressed
and said:"His work has an enormously sensitive, tactile quality
combined with a feel for very subtle colors. He uses collage elements
in a very dynamic manner creating constantly varying solutions to
formal problems. It is very difficult to find words to describe
all the additive factors that combine to produce the mystery that
accompanies his work." Cheu apparently employed colors not
so much to create aesthetics as to create moods.
In the early 70s, Cheu's
painting style took and unexpected but decisive turn. He decided
to start a series of paper works in small formats that averaged
one square foot. Equally stringent was the creative process: he
intentionally worked with dispatch and finished within a limited
time span. In essence, it was a pioneering attempt at exploring
the possibilities in collage making which involved the blazing of
new trails in his original approach. Consequently, his works showed
admirable variance. Many of his productions, in fact, displayed
a strong sense of originality and an intriguing delicacy.
In the mid 90s, Cheu began
to revert to a sphere of his artistic pursuit which had its roots
in traditional Chinese ink paintings. Here, his attention was directed
to the intrinsic abstract elements of the painting: space, energy,
nuance and the way their interplay creates an abstract landscape
of natural scenes. Nature was often the inspiration if not also
the theme of the work. But Cheu's interpretation of nature always
lay in its abstract hinting at nature's grandeur, mood and infinity.
There was, however, a sharp deviation from the traditional Chinese
ink painting: Cheu used assertive colors rather than simply black-ink
tones to convey his feelings. Another deviation was scale and material;
Cheu often worked with oil on large-size canvas. Some of his canvases
had tremendous impact and atmospheric effects made possible by his
relentless interplay of spontaneous yet energetic calligraphic brush
strokes and his original splashes of color.
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