This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

Flickering among the major figures of postwar art — the Minimalist sculptor Dan Flavin, the avant-garde artist Pierre Alechinsky, the abstract painter Sam Francis and others — is the radiant shadow of Walasse Ting.

Ting, a painter and poet from China, introduced Flavin to Japanese ink. He turned Alechinsky on to acrylic paint. Together, he and Francis explored the interplay between Western action painting and Asian brush techniques.

In an era when artists were typically siloed by geography and genre, Ting broke free, effortlessly creating fertile connections wherever he went. His own work, at its best, melded the elegance and delicacy of traditional Chinese ink painting with an eye-grabbing palette equally influenced by American Pop Art and the lurid colors of the Florida aviary he frequented, Parrot Jungle (now Jungle Island) in West Palm Beach.

Ting in the late 1950s on the roof of the building where he had his studio in Manhattan, on West 25th Street near Seventh Avenue. Credit…The Estate of Walasse Ting, via NSU Art Museum of Florida

Learning to paint in Shanghai, traveling to the avant-garde circles of Paris and settling among the Pop-fueled studios of New York gave him a rare, firsthand fluency in multiple visual languages. In each city, he absorbed and reshaped the dominant styles around him before adeptly collapsing the distances among them all.