Fondation Chu Teh-Chun

This retrospective exhibition of Chu Teh-Chun (1920–2014), “In Nebula,” will take place from April 20 to June 30, 2024, on the occasion of the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale of International Art. Organized in partnership with Fondazione Giorgio Cini, it will take place on the Isola San Giorgio Maggiore, across the Grand Canal from the Piazza San Marco, in Venice.

Produced with the support of the CHU Teh-Chun Foundation and curated by art historian Matthieu Poirier, this will be the most important exhibition in recent years dedicated to this Franco-Chinese painter, one of the key players in abstract art alongside Hans Hartung and Helen Frankenthaler.

Featuring exceptional loans, including one from the Musée d’art moderne de Paris, the exhibition will guide visitors through a series of emblematic paintings produced from 1955 onwards, the year Chu settled permanently in Paris, close to the Western avant-garde. A new monograph on the artist, published by Éditions Gallimard, Paris, with a text by Matthieu Poirier, will accompany the event.

This exhibition will challenge the classic retrospective, opening with recent large works and progressing in reverse chronological order back to his earliest small-format paintings. The three-dimensional scenography will resonate with the uncertain space of Chu’s pictorial nebula and the complex volumes of the venue.

Its goal is to renew our view of Chu’s work. Critical and institutional inter-pretations have long been focused on the recognition of an East-West dua-lity. While this remains relevant today, it should not prevent us from percei-ving, with the benefit of hindsight, the exceptional aesthetic singularity of his universe, teeming with historical resonances, whose echoes can be found in even the most contemporary creations.