Peintures, dessins, écrits
Texts by Gérard Audinet, Richard Crevier, Jacques Dars, Chang Ming Peng, and Bernard Sordet
This book brings together for the first time a representative selection of works by the contemporary Chinese painter Peng Wan Ts (oil paintings, drawings, and poems by the artist translated from the Chinese). They are accompanied by mostly unpublished appraisals of Wan Ts’s work by writers, art historians, a sinologist, and a museum curator. The breadth of material covered and the depth and thoroughness of the analysis make this a unique project. Lying at the point where the Chinese and Western cultures meet and rooted in the contemporary world as much as in the timeless world of dreams and the imagination, it creates a platform where the Far East and the West can make common cause. At the heart of the book lies man’s existential question, in which his body becomes a symbol within a pictorial space governed by the dialectic of the “breath,” a key concept in Chinese thought.
The book closely matches the chronology of the creation of the works to the artist’s stylistic and thematic development, seeking to identify his most supremely successful works.
Peng Wan Ts was born in Sichuan in 1939. After studying visual arts in Taiwan, he moved to Paris in 1965 and still lives and works there. He took part in the Paris Biennales of 1961, 1969, and 1971 and the 1963 São Paulo Biennale. His work has been exhibited in Finland, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, and Germany.
