Celebrating 45 years of championing Chinese contemporary art, Alisan Fine Arts’ 2026 “Then and Now” programme honours early French-influenced pioneers while spotlighting today’s practices. This exhibition at the gallery’s Central Hong Kong location anchors the “Then” with Zao Wou-ki, Chu Teh-chun, T’ang Haywen, and Walasse Ting, francophone Chinese diaspora masters who fused Chinese cultural roots with post-war Parisian modernism. From Zao’s atmospherics and Chu’s calligraphic lyrical abstraction to T’ang’s meditative ink and Ting’s pop-bright sensuality, it maps a decisive shift that shaped global art—and sets the stage for a parallel “Now” exhibition at Alisan Atelier. Both are part of French May Arts Festival Associated Projects.

Alisan Fine Arts has worked closely with Zao Wou-ki, Chu Teh-chun, and Walasse Ting since the gallery’s early years, fostering enduring relationships with the artists and their estates. For this exhibition, the works by Chu Teh‑chun and Walasse Ting are from their respective foundations and have never been shown before—offering audiences a rare glimpse into previously unseen chapters of their legacies.

Paris as Catalyst

After China stepped into a new era, artists of the time were greatly impacted by Western modern art movements. Masters like Paul Klee for Zao Wou-ki, Nicolas de Staël for Chu Teh-chun, Henri Matisse and the CoBrA group for Walasse Ting, and frequent travels for T'ang Haywen—these inspirations opened the eyes of Chinese diaspora artists when they migrated to Paris.

Trained in Hangzhou under Lin Fengmian, Zao and Chu arrived in Paris in the late 1940s to 1950s and shifted from figuration to abstraction. One of Zao's prints exhibited here consists of lines interspersed with pictograms and symbols—an abstract style tracing back to Paul Klee's influence, encountered in Bern in 1951. Chu Teh-chun incorporated calligraphic brushstrokes into abstract compositions, where thick and thin ink marks achieve meticulous balance as light divides Yin and Yang. T’ang Haywen settled in Paris from 1947, visiting museums and travelling throughout Europe and the USA, drawing inspiration from his journeys. Walasse Ting, arriving in 1953, collaborated with CoBrA artists including Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, and Pierre Alechinsky, and later the New York School, developing a sensuous, chromatic figurative style that fused Chinese sensibilities with pop-charged colour.

A New Visual Language

In the development of modern art, Chinese artists were initially absent from the conversation. When they arrived in Paris, Zao, Chu, T’ang and Ting each forged distinct paths to assert Chinese diaspora artistic identity within the avant-garde.

For this exhibition, we present never-before-exhibited ink on paper works by Chu Teh-chun from the 1980s and 1990s, revealing his mastery of lyrical abstraction in monochrome and moderate formats. A significant canvas from the 1970s demonstrates the full force of his calligraphic vision. Zao Wou-ki’s versatility appears across oil, lithograph, etching and watercolour—a thoughtful selection showcasing his command of multiple media, anchored by a major 1970s canvas. T’ang Haywen’s contribution features a grouping of watercolour on paper works revealing his penchant for the triptych even in intimate formats, distilling gesture to essence through Taoist sensibility and Western immediacy. Walasse Ting is represented by a rare black and white canvas from 1959 and a vibrant grouping of birds, horses and women images exhibited for the first time, bearing testimony to love, life and beauty through powerful, effervescent brushwork.