Ashmolean Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

Zhu Dequn (born 1920) had been a contemporary of Zhao Wuji (1921-2013) in the Hangzhou Academy and had also studied under Lin Fengmian (1900-1991). During the Second World War (1939-1945) he was in west China then Nanjing. From 1950 to 1955 he was Professor in the National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei. In 1955 he settled in Paris where, in 1999, he was installed as a member of the Academic des Beaux Arts.

Zhu’s response to the modernism he encountered in Paris was a series of canvases that display an almost violent repudiation of figurative art. Zhu has created, in oils and acrylics, an abstract style of luminous transparency, which has established his position among leading abstract expressionists in Paris. This painting, which is a cosmic landscape with Daoist undertones, was produced in 1988 for Khoan Sullivan (1919-2003) who wished for something with a predominantly blue colour. The inscription reads ‘To Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan. Affectionately, Zhu Dequn 1988.’