Tseng Yu's One-Man Exhibition, Paris 1956

At the end of 1955, Tseng Yu moved to Paris where he enrolled as a student at the Beaux-Arts and began intensive study of French language. His reading, always wide, now had a more Continental European edge, taking in Sartre, Camus, Brecht, Heidegger, Nietzsche as well as an immense range of books on Renaissance and modern European art.

He was captivated by tales from Greek mythology and he wrote "What am I doing now? I am painting trees all the days. Do you know the story of Daphne and Apollo? Daphne tried to avoid Apollo¹s chase and got her father to turn her into a tree. So Apollo finds himself embracing a laurel tree which still quivers in fear as, underneath the bark, a heart beats fitfully. So you see
my trees are not environmental, they are conveying an experience of feeling, they communicate the instinctive existence of objects."

This painting of the Bois de Boulogne was shown in Tseng Yu's first one-man exhibition in Paris, 1956.