Walasse Ting: Parrot Jungle

The extraordinary world of the artist Walasse Ting (1928-2010)

Walasse Ting (b. 1929, Wuxi, China, d. 2010, New York) was one of the most radical and independent figures of his time. His work fused the traditions of Chinese art with the rebellious spirit of the French avant-garde and combined the joy of the Northern European CoBrA movement with the kinesthetic power of Abstract Expressionism.

His work has been considered the most extraordinary collective book of the 1960s. Walasse Ting: Parrot Jungle goes beyond 1¢ Life, reflecting on the greater narrative of Ting's abundant oeuvre. It also provides readers the opportunity to immerse themselves in Ting's world, in which female figures with rainbow-coloured flesh are surrounded by flora, fauna, and a wild menagerie of cats, parrots, grasshoppers, butterflies, flamingos, peacocks, and horses.

It also documents the story of Ting's diasporic life, the formation of his transnational identity, and his defiantly independent spirit. Ting is an artist plagued with the gift of being born too soon. He was a global artist before universal cultural exchange defined modern life. His work eludes the restrictions used to form historical narratives, which rely on neatly placing artists and artworks in fixed national and stylistic groupings.

Western art history's inability to situate Ting in a singular construct has led him to be omitted from many of the cultural narratives in which he played a pivotal role.