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1 Cent Life was a product of the pop art period. The book was issued in an edition of 2100, and consists of over sixty original lithographs by various artists, assorted reproduced images (Callot print, American advertising, French stamps, etc.) and poetry by Walasse Ting. One hundred copies are in a special edition printed on handmade paper with each print numbered and signed by the artist. These were evenly distributed, with twenty for New York, twenty for Paris, twenty for the rest of the world, and the remaining forty reserved for the participating artists and collaborators. The copy that Wake Forest owns is 1816/2000 from the regular edition. The book was published by Kornfeld Publishing in Berne and printed in Paris by means of offset lithography, a technique commonly used in commercial printings. The printing process was supervised and reviewed by both Sam Francis and Walasse Ting, the creative force behind 1 Cent Life. Ting was born in 1928 in Shanghai, China, and went to France in 1948. This was an important move for him, because France introduced him to the bright vibrant colors of Picasso and Matisse. In 1958, he arrived in New York, and it was here that the conception for the book was born. The artist fell in love with the city--the bright colorful neon lights (another influence on his color)--and the energy generated by the people. In 1961, Ting started upon the project of 1 Cent Life, but did not have the financial backing or even the full arrangements made with the participating artists. In an article in May 1966, he describes how he began the book:
In the article, Ting went on to comment that after he wrote the poems, he waited for "angels" to publish it. This is where Sam Francis and Eli Kornfeld entered the project. Francis provided the money for the paper (over seventeen tons), and Kornfeld provided the company and equipment for the project to be printed. The participating artists were the friends and acquaintances of either Ting or Francis and at the time, were relatively unknown. They were each supplied either a stone or a plate, and with the other materials needed to create a litho. The poetry by Ting is not grammatically correct, and together with its choppy lines and seemingly disconnected ideas and imagery, mimics the sounds of his native language. Ting's poetry and art often brings together eastern and western influences, and he blends the two cultures together in 1 Cent Life. For example in NYC and Little Camelia he writes:
Ting believes that the attempt to intertwine the two cultures and their values creates an identity crisis in himself and his fellow Chinese artists. He says that the '[Chinese] artists are, to a certain extent, schizophrenics." He believes that they "try to resolve the contradiction by conscious means, by using traditional Chinese art in an attempt to modernize Chinese painting." He blends Chinese aestheticism with the excesses of American pop culture, represented by the artists of the New York pop art scene. One artist who was a prominent figure in the pop art scene was Andy Warhol. His repeated images of the lips in 1 Cent Life uses both popular subject matter and technique . The lips are no longer depicted as a functioning biological feature on the face of a human; instead, the lips are objectified by their repetition and shown in unnatural color--yellow, blue, black. The influence of expressionism is dominant in the book as well. In the 50's, the CoBrA group encouraged spontaneous and expressionistic figural art and rejected intellectualism and formalism. Two of the group's founding members are represented in the book: Asger Jorn and Karel Appel. Other artists, like Sam Francis, were influenced by Abstract Expressionism, a stle that avoided subject matter, and used line and color to express ideas. The combination of pop art and expressionism is evident in Ting's print (p. 48/49). The nude reclining woman is drawn in a realistic manner, but with the bold application and expressionistic use of color. Women and the sexuality that they symbolize are popular themes in Ting's art and poetry. The reclining nude woman is, of course, not a new subject in art, however, it is a theme perpetuated by the mass media and "popular culture" of the time. The two overall styles of the collaborators are symbolically pulled together in this print appropriately by the author. Unity in this collaboration is achieved by the prevailing expressionistic approach in most of the works and the bright, bold images and techniques of the pop artists in the others.
1. Farmer, 1981. 2. Denison, 1990. 3. W. Ting, 1966. 4. W. Ting. 5. W. Ting. 6. M. Ting, 1991. 7. W. Ting. 8. M. Ting. 9. M. Ting. 10. Denison. 11. M. Ting. 12. Livingstone, 1990. 13. Cummings, 1974. 28
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