Walasse Ting: Life, Paintings and a $3.3M Auction Record

Walasse Ting’s Tickle Me sold for $3.3 million at Kingsley Art Auction in Taipei in 2013 — a record for a painter who arrived in Paris in 1952 with five American dollars and no visa. Aurora & Athena currently holds one of his watercolors, Resting Woman, from the height of his New York period.

From Shanghai’s Streets to Paris

Ting was born in Wuxi, near Shanghai, in 1929, and grew up largely self-taught — he later said he learned to draw with chalk on the street as a boy. He briefly attended the Shanghai Art Academy but never considered the training formative. In 1952 he left for Paris with five dollars and no visa, settling into a small room in the Passage Riguinot. There he fell in with Karel Appel, Asger Jorn and Pierre Alechinsky — the core of CoBrA, the postwar European group built on raw, expressive, unschooled mark-making. Their influence shows up in the loose, confident line that stayed with Ting for the rest of his career, even as his subject matter changed completely.

New York and the Pop Turn

Ting settled in New York in 1958, just as Abstract Expressionism was giving way to Pop. His own style shifted with the decade: through the 1960s he moved from an expressionist vocabulary toward the fluorescent, sensual, pop-inflected paintings of women, cats, birds and horses that made him internationally known — thick, saturated color applied in loose, wet-into-wet washes, closer to the immediacy of his CoBrA years than to Pop’s cool detachment. In 1964 he realized a project he’d shared with the painter Sam Francis two years earlier: 1¢ Life, a book pairing 61 of Ting’s own poems with 62 original lithographs contributed by 28 major artists of the day, Francis among them, alongside Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Joan Mitchell — a genuinely rare document of who was talking to whom in New York’s art world at that moment. In 1970 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship for drawing, and continued moving between New York and Amsterdam for the rest of his career. He died in 2010.

Resting Woman at Aurora & Athena

Aurora & Athena’s Resting Woman is a watercolor from the 1980s — the loose brushwork and warm palette of Ting’s mature, best-known period, on the paper medium he worked in as often as canvas.

Market Value: What Ting’s Paintings Are Worth Today

Ting’s auction record stands at $3.3 million, set in 2013 at Kingsley Art Auction in Taipei for Tickle Me, a fluorescent-color painting from his best-known period. Works on paper — the medium Aurora & Athena’s piece belongs to — have reached $1.77 million at auction, though most trade well below that. Ting was prolific across six decades, and price depends heavily on period, subject and medium, with the vivid 1970s–80s nudes and animal paintings commanding the strongest demand from collectors today.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Walasse Ting?

Walasse Ting (1929–2010) was a Chinese-born painter and poet who moved from Shanghai to Paris in 1952, where he became associated with the CoBrA group, before settling in New York in 1958 and developing the vivid, pop-inflected style of women, cats, birds and horses that made him internationally known.

How much are Walasse Ting’s paintings worth?

Ting’s auction record is $3.3 million, for the painting Tickle Me at Kingsley Art Auction, Taipei, in 2013. His works on paper have sold for up to $1.77 million; most works trade well below that record, with price driven largely by period, subject and medium.

Where can I buy a Walasse Ting painting?

Aurora & Athena currently holds Ting’s Resting Woman, a 1980s watercolor. His work also surfaces regularly at auction houses specializing in postwar Asian and CoBrA-adjacent art, including Kingsley Art Auction, Artnet and Christie’s Hong Kong.