Do You Like Cool Breeze? 1983

Walasse Ting made 'Do You Like Cool Breeze?' with a vibrant array of colours. Just imagine him making it! The canvas is alive with these splashes of intense greens, pinks, blues, and purples that make up a figure and a field of flowers. I'm thinking about how he must have been moving when he made this. I feel like the painting probably emerged through gesture, trial, error, and intuition. The paint looks quite thin, almost like watercolour, which is what gives it that feeling of freedom and ease. It's all about surface here, the colours sitting next to one another, vibrating. You can almost feel the cool breeze of the title. I wonder if Ting was thinking about Matisse’s odalisques when he made this? Whatever it is, it’s a part of this larger conversation of painting, across time, where artists are always building on what others have done before. It’s about embracing that uncertainty, that ambiguity, and letting the painting be open to whatever interpretation comes.