Made two years after Chu reached Paris, this floral painting sits at the edge of his decisive transformation. Stem, blossom, and vessel remain legible, but their boundaries loosen into a web of marks. Color no longer simply fills an observed object; it produces a field in which the object can appear and recede.
The painting is useful precisely because it resists a tidy before-and-after story. Chu did not switch from figuration to abstraction overnight. He tested how much recognition a picture needed, and how line could retain the memory of a thing while acting independently across the canvas.
