Covering more than 50 years, the exhibition is the first to show the full breadth of Ting's stylistic development, as well as four never-before-seen 10-metre canvases - they are as breathtaking as they are large - that have spent most of the past 10 years rolled up in Ting's Amsterdam studio.

Private galleries in Taipei and Hong Kong are also mounting shows, including Hong Kong's Alisan Fine Arts (entitled I Love Flowers All My Life, until the end of the month) and SOKA Art Centre Taipei (titled The Floral Journey, until January 2).

'What he liked was youth, vibrancy, summer, spring,' says Guan Guan, a Taiwanese poet who became fast friends with Ting in the early 1970s. 'And when autumn came, he liked the autumn that wasn't autumn, the autumn with the flowers still blooming.'

His son Jesse Ting recalls: 'He painted every day of his life. He painted on Christmas. He painted on his birthday. He would paint when we were travelling, in the hotel room. Around him, you were always in the studio.'

Ting was a legendary bon vivant, whose success as an artist fed epicurean tastes and colourful fancies. From the 1970s on, his paintings flowed from an almost neon palette, and he also applied garish colour schemes and patterns to the suits he wore, the cars he drove and even the stories he told.

'He used to drive a Rolls Royce. If he didn't have 10 of them, he had a dozen. That's what he told me,' Guan Guan recalls.

A painter with a fleet of Rolls Royces?

'That's a big exaggeration,' laughs Mia Ting, his daughter. 'With my father, there were a lot of exaggerations and to be fair, I think he prompted most of them.'

'When he had more than one - I think he had three at one time - you have to understand that these were all second-hand cars,' says Jesse.

'That he traded paintings for,' adds Mia. 'He painted them green and purple. They lost any resale value the moment he bought them.'

Ting was born in 1929 and took some early formal training at the Shanghai Art Academy, but all his life he prided himself as a naif and an autodidact - virtues that are closely associated with modern art. He claimed his first sale of paintings came in the late 1940s in Hong Kong, where he persuaded a bookshop owner on Hollywood Road to display some watercolours, which caught the eye of John Keswick, a taipan who exercised considerable control in southern China and headed the Jardine Matheson business empire.

The Taipei retrospective begins a few years later in the mid-1950s, and traces Ting's early development through black-and-white action painting, expressionistic nudes in the 60s, and then abstract expressionism of the late-60s using his signature neon palette.

Ting was also writing poetry at this time, both in Chinese and in an ungrammatical English that, combined with the modern-day Zen-like riddles they presented, had the ring of pop art. From his 1964 untitled poem, 'Stomach sunk in whiskey/ Pee inside pants/ I saw a little star/ Where is my baby tonight', perhaps it is not such a stretch to the deadpan speech bubbles of the comic-inspired paintings of Roy Lichtenstein.

Ting's oeuvre sits on the crossroads between abstraction and pop, Europe and the US, and also between expatriate Chinese artists and the West. Photorealist Hilo Chen and painter Dennis Huang were also close friends in New York, and Mia and Jesse remember many others dropping by both home and studio. In Taiwan, Ting was a member of the collective that published the Epoch Poetry Quarterly, and Guan Guan was only one in an expansive circle of friends.

'As my father wrote in one of his books, 'I don't belong to any group',' says Mia. 'But art-historically speaking, I think that also hurt him, not being identified with one in particular.'

Ting's mature painting style dates from the 1970s, at which time he applied his full explosion of colour to erotic, highly expressionistic paintings of nude women. He later toned down this intense sexuality, but his subject matter had been distilled to his core elements, which were women, flowers and birds, and to a lesser extent butterflies, grasshoppers and the other denizens of the hothouse of Ting's florid imagination.

From the mid-1980s, Ting began painting on rice paper, syncretising a Chinese-inspired, pop art version of bird and flower painting. It's a purely decorative realm, and it's where he's at his most magnificent.

How will Ting be remembered? As a Chinese Matisse, come home at last? Or a curious wild-card in the mix of New York pop and abstraction? His work certainly rests in the collections of the greatest museums of the West - the Metropolitan and MoMA in New York, London's Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and many others - but since 1990 he has largely exhibited in Asia.

On the question of legacy, however, Ting himself might not have cared much. 'The way Walasse Ting lived life, it was almost Zen,' says Guan Guan. 'For him, life is just like that. The most important thing was to live in the moment.'