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In 1953 Tseng Yu came to London and enrolled in the Slade School of Fine Art. He had studied European painting and greatly looked forward to joining a school made famous by such former students as Stanley Spencer, Matthew Smith and Roger Fry. Initially he attended classes in oil painting in order to explore whether it was possible to articulate Chinese visual imagination through the heavier medium of oil.
Among the most successful paintings of this period was this study of a blue vase with persimmons. He told me that Chinese traditional painting was not concerned with literal copying of nature, rather that each item was seen as radiating its own individual essence, each like a sun, and relating to other items as in a constellation.
