Chu Teh-Chun left China where he was born in 1920, after studying at the Fine Arts in Hangzhou and having been a professor at Nanjing University until 1949, Taiwan in 1950 and in Taipei. He arrived in Paris in 1955. His first solo exhibition was held in 1960 at the Galerie Legendre where it is noticed as rookie of the School of Paris.
He traveled to Spain, Venice, Holland and the US, where he spends several months. He was invited to the Tenth Biennial of Sao Paulo.
In 1982, André Malraux Museum in Le Havre devotes a large exhibition of drawings and paintings, then presented to the Orangerie de Bagatelle in Paris.
The following year, he was invited by the Department of Beaux - Arts of the University of Hong Kong as a jury member of graduation, and by the Union of Artists of China, to rediscover his country where he does had not returned for twenty-eight years.
From the years 1990 - 1993, Chu emphasizes major formats, diptychs and triptychs. Several major exhibitions have been organized in recent years, including exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Liege in 1988 and the Taiwan Museum in 1991; the Dunkirk Museum and Patrice Trigano Gallery, 1991; a traveling exhibition in various museums of Quebec, in 1997; a traveling exhibition in the Far East to China Palace in Beijing, the Hong Kong Museum and the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan. In 1998, Chu has exhibited at the Musée des Beaux - Arts of Taipei and executes a series of large ceramic dishes. During the summer of 2000, the Shanghai Museum has an important collection of his work.
During 2001, the knowledge of his work is still progressing, both in East and West. The last stage of its second major exhibition in the Far East is at Pusan Metropolitan Museum in Korea. In France, Chu is honored by two decorations: in June 2001 he became a Knight of the Order of Academic Palms and July 14, 2001 he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the President of the Republic. In September of the same year he exhibited at gallery Enrico Navarra.
In 2003, he completed a monumental canvas of 7 meters long entitled "Festive Symphony" for the Shanghai Opera. It is exposed to a first public presentation in the front foyer of the Palais Garnier in Paris.
In 2004, as part of the Year of China in France, the City of Cannes organizes a triple exhibition in tribute to Chu Teh-Chun. The same year he exhibited at the Galerie Patrice Trigano, Paris. As part of the Year of France in China, the Shanghai Museum of Beaux-Arts will host an exhibition of new works entitled "The inner image reaches its fullness in abstraction."
In April 2006 an important monograph in French and English is published for the difference Editions with a text Pierre-Jean Rémy. Chu has a first solo exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in New York.
By choice of President Jacques Chirac, Chu Teh-Chun became an Officer of the National Order of Merit in 2006. The same year, Chu receives in Luxembourg the Gold Medal of European Merit.
Chu Teh Chun died March 26, 2014 in Paris.
QUOTES:
"At the heart of his painting, the elements are represented from colored shapes in perpetual metamorphosis. They tell the passing of time and found that space-time became painting. The memory responds to the knowledge of the world. His lyricism is born of an inner contemplation, a communion with nature that maintained the same leads to deliver the light, incarnated from chromaticism where blues, greens predominate, awakened by red, land, yellow. Fracas, echoes, swirls, chasms, crevices, glare are in unison with a painterly texture, fluid or harder. Each painting is an open journey of the sensible world. "
- Lydia Harambourg in La Gazette de l'Hotel Drouot, February 27, 2004
"Chu Teh-Chun is not a landscape painter frozen in its steadfastness and its greatness, but a painter of nature, which, in nature, is fluctuating, moving, passenger. His work is born from two cultures but one desire: to build by the expressive color, to speak the whole table by the sum of the free and spontaneous gestures, total body and mind, is both empty and light, heat and life L. the artist is a sensitive plate of the universe. "
- Pierre Cabanne for the monograph published by Editions Flammarion, Paris, 2000
