T'ang Haywen

(The name would be written hǎiwén in the pinyin romanisation system; "T'ang" is a regional pronunciation of his surname character 曾, which is pronounced "zēng" in standard Chinese.)

He undertook little formal artistic training, but spent much time in museums and galleries, where he closely observed the work of Western masters, quoting them freely in his early oils and watercolors.

His works were influenced by the aesthetic legacy of Western masters like Henri Matisse, J. M. W. Turner and the impressionists, and shaped by the spiritual elements of the Taoist approach to painting, in which the artist seeks to capture the interplay of energies that give life to the natural world.

[1] Typical works of this period were quick studies of scenes in the natural world, often rendered in a few brushstrokes, that gave life to his conviction that "painting is the embodiment of energy."

His synthesis of the Eastern Taoist tradition with a Western aesthetic, together with the arresting beauty of his compositions, began to attract serious attention from a small circle of critics, painters and admirers.

In May 1991 his friend Yonfan Manshih, the movie director and photographer from Hong Kong, shot T'ang's last known portrait in his small apartment of the rue Liancourt in Paris.