Tseng Yu-Ho (Betty Ecke, Chinese/American, Hawaii, born 1924)
Born in Beijing in 1923, Tseng Yu-Ho studied the ancient art of mounting scroll paintings on a collage of various papers made of bamboo, mulberry tree bark, cotton, rice stalks, hemp or silk. In her work, the artist extended this technique to the surface of her paintings, where each sheet is colored before it is layered on another in order to attain the effect of opacity or translucency.
In 1949 Yseng Yo-Ho settled with her German husband in Hawaii and in 1953 she received a Rockefeller art scholarship for study in the United States. In 1960 she held her first one-woman show at the legendary Downtown Gallery in New York.
Information courtesy of Sotheby’s, September 2008.