Chinese-American painter Walasse Ting’s eclectic style emerged from his many artistic affiliations. After engaging with ink painting during his student years in Shanghai, he moved to Paris and joined CoBrA, an avant-garde movement formed in 1948 by artists in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam who drew inspiration from the art of children. Ting later found success as an émigré artist in New York during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. During the late 1950s, he experimented with a gestural approach to painting, as evidenced by this abstract canvas. He painted the works in this series on the roof of his studio by flinging a brush loaded with black paint in broad, energetic movements. His controlled outbursts resulted in dynamic paintings composed of black masses from which matter seems to spurt, forms that in some cases convey the visual effect of fireworks. Ting’s use of black pigment on raw canvas at the start of his New York period may be read as a subtle homage to the Chinese calligraphic tradition of kuang cao shu (wild cursive script), brought into dialogue with American action painting.