On March 16, April 14, and April 28, 1988, at Saint-Eustache Church in Paris, Chu Teh-Chun took part in a multidisciplinary performance combining readings of texts by Victor Segalen as recited by Jean-Loup Philippe, a piano recital by Alain Kremski (featuring works by Debussy), and live painting.

In resonance with the music and spoken word, the artist created gouaches on paper in real time, extending the poetic and meditative dimension of the performance throughgesture and color. Blending Western lyrical abstraction with the Chinese calligraphictradition, his work offered, within the spiritual acoustics of Saint-Eustache, a rare experience of artistic unity. Jean-Loup Philippe would get the work as a present at the end of the performance.

This gouache is a very unique and rare work created by Chu in his artistic career. In 1988, Chu was invited alongside other prominent cultural figures, including Ladislas Kijno, Gilles Plazy, and Claude Bertrand, to grace the piano recital of Alain Kremski. Chu created six improvised works on the spot, one being Untitled featured in this auction. Since it was considered a "performance", the artist needed to have the translucent tracing paper mounted vertically to face the onlooking audience, who could observe the entire creation process. The colourful ink drops slowly drip downward, forming stave-like patterns as if echoing the piano tunes. This large vertical painting stretches some 2.6 meters long, thus requiring the artist to exert himself with full-range body movements and emotions, and make use of the fluidity of the inks to move in sync with him, letting the colours trickle down to form dots, lines, and planes. The paint brush is controlled by the artist's emotions at that particular moment, much like Wang Xia, a Chinese painter active in the eighth century, who would get inebriated every time before working on a painting and let his body and mind take over his paint brush. This improvisation and randomness bring to mind the drip-style paintings of Jackson Pollock and the action painting of French abstract artist Georges Mathieu.

“We can ‘read’ his gestures with the brush as mountains or clouds, as waves, as the cosmic swirl of Chaos at the beginning of the world,- visionary forms, forever appearing and dissolving before our eyes. Like the dragons in a Chan painting by the Song Dynasty master Chen Rong, Chu’s images occupy some mysterious realm between form and the formless, the temporal and the eternal” ---Michael Sullivan