T'ang Haywen: the Lyrical Landscapes

Chinese painting is never abstract. As T'ang Haywen says himself, his is an art that never loses touch with the sensible world. In his ink works, which are at the border between abstraction and figuration, the artist creates poetic landscapes. These works are either done masterfully in ink, or present colourful , almost expressionnistic watercolours.  

T'ang Haywen's works - be they in the traditional ink, or in watercolour and gouache, unveil the immense talent of a painter that the public is rediscovering only now. contemporary with Zao Wou-Ki and Chu Teh-Chun, the trio are considered nowadays some of the most important painters of the Post-war school of Paris.
During the CHINA-PARIS exhibition of 1988 at the Taipei Museum of Art, the curator says : Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun and T'ang Haywen combined Chinese calligraphy and philosophy in a non-representational art form and distinguished themselves as abstract expressionist painters.

In this climate of the triumph of abstraction during the Post-War years, T'ang himself speaks of his position on art as a radical stance:
" ...Undoubtedly, the play of abstraction can stimulate the mind momentarily, but once the moment of deciphering and understanding has passed, nothing blossoms in the sensibility, the figure is dead, even the memory of it fades. Our deep sensibility, linked to the unconscious, can only develop and grow when nourished by the tangible, i.e., in the case of painting, by the recall in our conscious memory of deep and lasting sensitive experiences we have had in the real world. It is from a certain more or less preponderant material figuration that painting can develop, renew itself without losing itself, and unfold in the realms of affectivity and spirituality..."
The art of T'ang Haywen is neither figurative or non-figurative, neither abstract nor representational. His is an art of total freedom, of philosophical landscapes.