Beschreibung:

IRENE CHOU (ZHOU L Ü YUN, 1924-2011)
Untitled
IRENE CHOU (ZHOU L Ü YUN, 1924-2011) Untitled Hanging scroll Ink and colour on paper 187 x 96.5 cm. (73 5/8 x 38 in.) Executed in 1992 Irene Chou born in Shanghai, was a graduate of the legendary St. John’s University which closed in 1952. She left China in 1949 and settled in Hong Kong. She studied painting initially under Lui Shou Kwan but her work made a breakthrough after she began qigong practice from a Taoist master Hsu I-fan in the early 1980s. Her intention was to improve her poor health but meditative practice produced unexpected consequences. The collector, also from Shanghai, was a fellow student with Master Hsu with the painter, Zhao Hai Tien, another Shanghai diaspora soulmate. The three met frequently to discuss Buddhism, qigong and art, until Irene moved to Australia in her last years to be with her son. Irene Chou confided to the collector how her meditation practice had liberated her from preconceptions to enable her to express more freely her “soul”. Her new style was full of energy and dynamism absent from her earlier work. One could feel a force within the swirling spaces resembling a spinning galaxy. Her practice also brought her closer to a Buddhist tenet: compassion. In overcoming her depression from the death of her husband she found the strength to better understand the nature of suffering. Irene Chou was more than an abstract expressionist painter. Her works were an expression of China’s profound philosophical ageless wisdom: the nature of namelessness and compassion.