Famous for his love for drawing women, Walasse Ting, also known as "The Flower Thief, is also an artist with quite a personality. Born in Wuxi, Jiangsu and raised in Shanghai, he began drawing on the streets in his childhood. Though he briefly attended Shanghai Special Fine Arts School, he had always considered himself a self-taught artist. Moving to Paris 1952 at the age of 23, he befriended several CoBrA artists. He then moved to New York, where he developed styles in America's pop art and abstract expressionism. Before heading to Paris, Walasse Ting had completed a body of life drawings in ink, which he treasured enough to bring with him to Paris by sea.

However, after expanding his horizons, he realized that he still had much to learn, so he threw away these works and decided to begin anew. His audacious personality paved the way for his daring future developments. Walasse Ting was a romantic at heart who loved writing poems. Many of the works in his publications were hand-written poems in both Chinese and English, his individualistic print of the 1950's exploring lust and the female body in an expression of his burning vitality. After arriving in America, he began working with new media such as oils, acrylics, and pastels, alongside the inks he was so familiar with. Walasse Ting's earlier works were mostly blackandwhite abstract expressionism works of eastern influences, his brushwork utilizing the expressiveness of calligraphy. It was in the 1960's that he began to gravitate towards neon and pop colors, his subjects becoming more figurative while still retaining the amusing qualities of eastern ink paintings in every flick of his brush. His early acrylics were mostly painted on canvas. From the 1980's onward, his main choice of medium was ricepaper, his inked lines and colorful modern colors remaining very much the same while cleverly blending in methods of expression from both the east and the west.