Sans titre (Scène de neige)

‘I painted several works in a predominately white palette. Along my journey to Geneva, I saw the Alps covered in snow. When the mists were moving, there were distinct layers and shifting tones between the white of the mists and the white of the snow. In my mind I could see nothing but scenes of those mists moving over the white lands and the depths appearing within them. My heart seemed to rise up and subside in time with the shifting colours, from deep to shallow, from dense to light, and immediately images from Tang poetry came to mind.’ —Chu Teh-Chun (Quoted in Liao Qiong-Fang, Overseas Chinese Fine Arts Series II: Chu Teh-Chun, Taipei, 1999, p.56)

In the winter of 1985, Chu Teh-Chun passed through Geneva, where he was deeply moved by an ephemeral spectacle of falling snow. This experience would become an important source of inspiration for his later Snow Scene series. Sans titre (Scène de neige) features a vertical composition, with mint green and pale ochre forming the background, over which broad white brushstrokes construct the painting’s layered structure. Chu approached oil painting with the sensibility of ink painting, employing drips and splashes that cascade along diagonal trajectories, evoking snowflakes swirling in the wind. Delicate, lively dots and lines capture the traces of wind and snow, imbuing the snow not merely with form, but with a sense of vitality and movement. The entire landscape seems to drift slowly within an atmosphere of wintry luminosity and resonance. Throughout the Snow Scene series, the oil paint loses its heavy texture, while it delineates the subtle variations between dry and wet, rich and light. Amid bold and expansive brushstrokes, an ethereal landscape of mountain mists and distant peaks emerges, before turning into a spiritual realm suffused with the atmospheric fluidity of ink painting. In The Secrets of Landscape Painting, Tang dynasty painter Wang Wei wrote of ‘following the nature of the natural world and revealing the workings of creation’, advocating that painters should not simply reproduce the landscape before them, but draw on their own authentic perception to elevate the tangible landscape into an intangible realm of insight and feeling. Chu’s Snow Scene series embodies precisely this approach. The snow depicted in the painting is not merely a natural phenomenon, but a projection of the artist’s inner emotions and spiritual state. In transforming the majestic snow-covered landscapes of the Alps, he renders them as a lyrical poem.

The work of Chu Teh-Chun is rooted in the philosophy of Eastern art. He remarked, ‘Fan Kuan has said that “learning from nature is better than learning from man, and the human heart is an ever greater source for learning than nature.” What he meant by that was that he considered the painter dominant, and that there was already a concept of abstraction. The Chinese people just didn’t use the term “abstraction”, that’s all. Nature is absorbed into the artist’s thought and then undergoes refinement, and it is the power of the artist’s imagination, his sensibility, and his inner character that are revealed on the canvas. This is where the concepts behind Chinese painting and abstract painting very neatly come together.’ (ibid., p.53) In this spirit, he employs refined lines and poetic brushwork to transform the Alps, shrouded in snow and mist, into an abstract landscape of monumental grandeur. This artistic vision is grounded in his profound contemplation of nature and the cosmos. What he seeks is not a world governed by order and convention, but a natural universe in a state of perpetual becoming and renewal. Sans titre (Scène de neige) is a visual embodiment of this cosmic vision. As the viewer’s gaze moves through the painting, one seems to find oneself standing atop of a snow-covered mountain ridge, experiencing, between grandeur and serenity, the ceaseless vitality of all things in the universe and the poetic resonance of Eastern aesthetics.