T'ang Haywen

From the moment he arrived in Paris in 1948, officially to study medicine, T’ang Haywen adopted France as his new home. He discovered a country buzzing with creativity. Like other international artists, he encountered Western modernity, and just like Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013) or Chu Teh-Chun (1920-2014), the first Chinese artists who came to Paris to study, he became one of the emblematic figures of the effervescent Montparnasse art scene.

T’ang Haywen was trained in Western painting, and there is evidence in his sketch books of regular visits to museums in Paris, including Guimet, and that he was inspired by the urban landscape, which he quickly sketched with a ball-point pen. A modern scholar, driven by an insatiable curiosity about Western art and culture, it was in Paris that he found his vocation as a painter. T’ang Haywen was a discreet artist and progressively affirmed himself as a major figure of contemporary art and Chinese modernity.

With a selection of around one hundred major works, this exhibition offers a panorama of the main stages in his career as well as the key aspects of the work of this artist who endeavoured to capture, in his own words: “the ideal painting, combining both the visible and the imaginary.”

The exhibition features a series of rare works and archive pieces, which had until now been secretly kept in his studio. These paintings shed new light on the personal life of this fundamentally free-spirited, simple-living artist and reflect his attachment to Asian asceticism. A

The exhibition includes a large selection of work from an exceptional donation of 202 paintings and around 400 pieces from personal archives made to Guimet in 2022.

Curator: Valérie Zaleski, curator of the Chinese paintings and Chinese Buddhist art collections at the Guimet Museum

The exhibition podcast: Discover T'ang Haywen at his arrival in Paris with Judith Benhamou, journalist and art critic

In partnership with Studio Nova.