Wu Gaunzhong is an artist of special significance in the history of the 20th century Chinese painting. He, for his thought of art and practice in art, is not only a unique figure of the contemporary Chinese painters, but also has broad and far-reaching influences. Since the 1980s, his ideas of art and his works of painting have been producing one sensation after another in the artistic circles of China, and further promote changes and advancements of modern ideas of painting in China.

　　If counted from the time he entered the National Hangzhou Art College, Wu has already devoted over seventy years to art; if counted from the time he graduated from the National Higher School of Fine Arts (l’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts) in Paris and came back home to work as a teacher, he has already devoted over half a century to art. The Painter, though in his eighties, is still energetic, and busy painting with his brush. And for those who have been paying their attention to his art, it is now the ideal time to make a reflective study of his long and curving artistic pilgrimage.

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　　Wu Guanzhong was born in 1919 in Beiqu Village, Zhakou Township, Yixing County, Jiangsu Province. That was the rural country in the south, often referred to as “the country of fish and rice”, where people made their living by rice planting, silkworm raising and fishing. Wu’s father, Wu Kuangbei, was a primary school teacher in a mountain village, and meanwhile, a farmer who had to labour in the rice paddies. When Wu was six, he became one of the first pupils of the Wu Clan Primary School, which was that year established by Wu Kuangbei with the support of the Wu Clan Hall, with the clan hall account as the head master, and the clan hall house as the schoolhouse. Upon graduation from lower primary school (grade four of primary school), Wu was admitted to Ershan Primary School of Heqiao Town. In 1932, when Wu graduated from Ershan Primary School, he was admitted to the Secondary School of the Provincial Wuxi Normal School of Jiangsu. Three years later, he was admitted to the Advanced Industrial Vocational School attached to Zhejiang University. He stayed in that vocational school for only one year. Soon he changed his career aim, with the encouragement of Zhu Dequn, a student in an art college, and turned to take an entrance examination of the National Hangzhou Art College, setting out on the road of art thereafter. That was 1936, when Wu was 17.

　　In the old times, the candidates for degrees in fine arts were primarily those “partial learners” who put little effort into the “major subjects” (Chinese, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and English) in school years. Wu was a rare exception. From primary school, through middle school, through college, to admission to the National Higher School of Fine Arts in Paris with governmental aid, Wu excelled all the way in academic achievements. This excellence not only played a decisive role in his admission to college at home and abroad, but also exercised considerable influences upon his later development in art, as reflected in his image in the world of contemporary Chinese art and his artistic ideas that are quite different from the current ones. Wu, when taking his preparatory courses in the National Hangzhou Art College, was excited by the strong atmosphere of art, and at the same time astonished by the poor academic achievements of his fellow students. I guess that he might have a similar state of mind when he skimmed over the articles attacking him written by experts of the fine art circles tens of years later.

　　The first teacher of painting Wu met was Miao Zuyao, a friend of his father’s, and a teacher at the Wu Clan Primary School. Like all painters in the rural areas of those years, Miao Zuyao was good at the landscape, the flower-and-bird, and the figure; however, environment and knowledge restricted such painters in their artistic development. The significance of Miao Zuyao to Wu’s artistic career was that, he made Wu in his childhood know how one took his brush to paint. In a strict sense, the National Hangzhou Art College was where Wu had a real starting point for his artistic career, and where such teachers as Li Chaoshi and Fang Ganming introduced him directly to the art of painting. Li Chaoshi, who studied art in France, had a style of clarity and refinery, and was “very cool and calm” in the impression of Wu. Fang Ganming was obviously a follower of post-impressionists and cubists, but the rigorousness and orderliness he presented in his teaching, formed a contrast to the free expressionism in art demonstrated by Lin Fengmian the college president, and Wu Dayu the director of the Department of Western Painting. Wu Dayu was the person admired by the young students who put their effort into the Western painting, and, as Wu said, “he was the flag of the National Hangzhou Art College, and the National Hangzhou Art College was the flag in the introduction of modern art from the Western world”, “some of the students even imitated him in the manner of walking”. Wu, in his early days in the National Hangzhou Art College, did not study directly under the instruction of Wu Dayu, but Wu Dayu infected his young admirers with his generosity and enthusiasm, and what Wu got from him was the everlasting enthusiasm for art.

　　The art education of Wu begun in 1936 was soon disturbed by the Japanese invasion. From the second half of 1937 on, Wu, together with his teachers and fellow students of the National Hangzhou Art College, began a life in exile. They started their exile from Hangzhou, made their way through Zhuji County of Jiangsu and the Longhu Mountains of Jiangxi, and had stopovers in Hunan, Guizhou and Yunnan, and settled down finally in Bishan County of Sichuan. The students of the National Hangzhou Art College continued their artistic learning in an exile of thousands of miles and under the threat of war fire; this was indeed a page unparalleled of the history of art education of China. After such life and learning in exile, the artists of China experienced radical changes in their artistic qualities and life styles. War fire and exile, carved eternal prints on Wu.

　　In the early 1930s, there was no institutional division between Chinese painting and Western painting in the National Hangzhou Art College, and many of the students put little effort into Chinese painting. Wu, however, in his college years, had great interest in traditional Chinese painting. When the Art College moved to Yunnan, Chinese painting and Western painting were institutionally divided, Wu had a transfer from the Department of Western Painting to the Department of Chinese Painting, but later had a transfer back to the Department of Western Painting because he could not forget the expressive powers of colour. He had lifelong benefits, however, from the creativity and the unique power and style of Pan Tianshou the Director of the Department of Chinese Painting.

　　Cai Yuanpei and Lin Fengmian established the National Academy of Art, aiming at constructing the highest institution of art education, but it was the young artists gathering at the side of West Lake who always took an advantageous position, looking downward upon the artistic circles. In all fairness, the artists who fostered art education in the 1930s were primarily passionate younger forces in the circles of artists. As far as their own artistic careers were concerned, these younger artists were still in the stage of early development, and what the teaching in the National Hangzhou Art College brought to Wu was the basic painting skills and the artistic tastes that corresponded to the Western currents in art. Of all the teachers, the ones whom Wu had always in mind were Lin Fengmian, Wu Dayu, and Pan Tianshou. They were themselves outstanding in painting achievements, but what they inspired Wu with was the temperaments and personalities.

　　In 1942, after his graduation from the National Hangzhou Art College, Wu went to Chongqing to work as a teacher. In the following four years, he put much effort into Chinese literature and French, preparing himself for advanced programmes. In 1946, the Ministry of Education of the Chinese Government, for the first time after the War, had examination selection of candidates for programmes at foreign institutions of higher education with governmental aid, and of the candidates there were two for degrees in fine art. Wu, with the most outstanding achievements, won the chance to study in France with governmental aid (according to the documents of the Ministry of Education, Wu passed selection examinations for both government-aided and non-government-aided candidates).

　　In 1947, Wu went to France, to study painting at the National Higher School of Fine Arts in Paris. The schools of fine art in Paris in the 1940, were quite different from what they had been when Xu Beihong studied in Paris. The impressionism Xu Beihong and his teachers took much pains to avoid turned out to be the classic of the world of painting, and Professor Souverbie, who taught Wu, was similar to Picasso and Blaque in the artistic style. In 20 years, two generations of Chinese students, received completely different art education abroad. Xu Beihong, with unparalleled contempt for “painting of new schools”, returned to try to establish in China a world of scholastic artists; whereas, Wu, upon his graduation, returned with an aspiration to “translate the formal laws of the plastic art” for the Chinese people. Yet, the literary policy and the artistic climate were developing in a direction that was quite different from what Wu had imagined. The circumstances surrounding Lin Fengmian and Wu Dayu, the teachers whom Wu admired most, could best prove the then situation of the world of fine art in China. These two professors, who advocated “painting of new schools” (in the 1930s and the 1940s, the term was used in the fine art circles of China to refer to the various modernistic schools of painting), became targets for sharp criticism in Hangzhou Art College reordered and reorganized; the works by themselves and by the students they appreciated were paraded as negative examples. Lin Fengmian made a self-criticism of his sins of advocating “painting of new schools” at the meeting of the teaching group of the Department of Painting, “The students are not to blame, it is not their fault. We who advocated painting of new schools are responsible. We diverted from the right direction, and the influences led the students astray.” Pang Xunqin, the newly appointed director of the Department declared that they would organize the instructions according to the new syllabus, so as to “atone for our sins”.[1]In the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, against formalistic concerns of the students, the Academy executives warned, “Students! If we divert from the new realistic methods of creation and treat the technique in an isolated way, we will find ourselves fooled! We will be captives of the decadent ideas of art on the matter of the form.” [2] Under such circumstances, it was inevitable that Wu would fall target for criticism in art in 1950, upon his return from France.

　　In the 1950s, returned students were assigned jobs by the government, different people to different positions. Wu encountered Dong Xiwen, a fellow student at Hangzhou Art College. On the strong recommendation of Dong Xiwen, Wu was assigned to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, to work as a teacher. That year, Wu was 31. There were easy means found of communications between the young teacher and the young students, Wu, in his own words, “meant to pour out what I learned from the West as if emptying the basket, so that the students younger than I am may select and take.” But soon the literary rectification movement began, and Wu fell under criticism, because he spread “the bourgeois formalism” in his teaching, and there were critics pointing out that he actually knew nothing of the socialist art! The mainstream voices of the fine art circles gave their opinion that the modernistic painting of the West was the bourgeois art “going towards decadency and death”, and that Abstract Painting was “the decadent art with Paris as its nursery, with America the imperialist power of the dollar kingdom as its feeder, --to resist the new realistic art rising in the Soviet Union and other new-democratic states.” [3] This occurred, however, not long after Wu left Paris and arrived in Beijing.

　　In the summer of 1951, three artists, who were quite representative of the fine art circles, left Hangzhou Art College. Lin Fengmian and Wu Dayu, after sufferings of criticism, left Hangzhou and settled down in Shanghai, putting an end to the art education career. Jiang Feng was transferred from Hangzhou Art College to the Central Academy of Fine Arts and was appointed vice-president of the Academy, leading the rectification movement and the ideological remoulding movement in the Academy. As the headline of one of his summary articles, he had the wording “Resolutely Carry Through the Ideological Remoulding, Thoroughly Eliminate the Bourgeois Influences from Fine Art Education”, giving a clear expression of his judgement of the ideological situation of the Central Academy of Fine Arts.[4]

　　The “rectification movement” so called, began with the criticism of the film The Life of Wuxun as its prelude, and spread soon over, becoming the political movement to rectify the ideology of the total literary world.[5] Simultaneously carried out, were the “ideological remoulding” and the “organizational clearing” movements in the institutions of higher education. Xu Beihong was much pleased and encouraged that “the formalism popular in the past and the outdated, evil and decadent literary painting that once existed in China, under the new arts policies and principles, have already disappeared, and fallen all by themselves” [6], but Xu Beihong was not the one then in charge of the literary rectification, ideological remoulding, and organizational clearing movements, instead, Jiang Feng the vice-president was.

　　Tens of years later, there were people who cast doubt upon that Wu was once criticized in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, seeming to say that that he was criticized was something overstated. The fact is that not only Wu was criticized, but also many other teachers were criticized in the literary rectification and the ideological remoulding movements. To the organizers and the activists of the movements, the event might be referred to not as “criticism” but only as “help”, and even if such “help” was fiercer and more severe, it was to meet the need to “mend their ways and save them”. As to those who were criticized, however, such criticism brought them unhealable hurt in the mind and the personality. To Wu who had just returned from Paris, in particular, such criticism meant contempt and negation to his ideas of art and ideals of art.

　　In 1953, Wu was transferred, from the Central Academy of Fine Arts to the Department of Architecture, to teach the course of painting. Yet, the transfer was not a one-way out-transfer of Wu, but an exchange with Qinghua (Tsinghua) University for Li Zongjin. Li Zongjin was then famous for his portraits of political leaders after the standard style of the Soviet Union. According to the literary policies and the teaching standards of that time, the exchange of Wu for Li Zongjin was something much desired, like killing two birds with one stone. “Misfortune is what fortune relies on, and fortune is what misfortune hides in.” Leaving the highest academy of fine art in China meant leaving the vortexes of literary climates, and Wu was therefore given a considerably peaceful environment of living and painting. Li Zongjin, who was transferred into the Central Academy of Fine Arts, was labeled as a rightist four years later in the anti-rightist movement, as one of the principal member of the “Jiang Feng Anti-Party Group”.

　　From 1950 to 1953, for nearly three years, Wu worked in the Central Academy of Fine Arts. These three years changed the state of Wu being foreign to and ill-adapted to the new environment around him. For another three years he taught in Qinghua University. And in these three years, he, by way of landscape drawing from life, continued his study of the pictorial form to which he had paid much attention. In September 1956, Beijing Normal Institute of Arts (which was renamed as Beijing Academy of Arts) was established, based upon the Department of Fine Art and the Department of Music of Beijing Normal University. Wu was transferred from Qinghua University to the Department of Fine Art of Beijing Normal Institute of Arts, to be the head of the teaching-research section of oil painting. Beijing Normal Institute of Arts gathered a group of non-mainstream painters of the time, such painters as the vice-president Wei Tianlin who studied in Japan in the 1920s, the director of the Department of Fine Art Li Ruinian who studied in Belgium, the vice-director of the Department of Fine Art Zhang Anzhi who studied in Britain and returned at the same time with Wu. Wei Tianlin, whose “painting style was close to the Impressionists”, was dismissed from the National Beiping Art College in 1946, and went to Kongde School to work as a painting teacher, and later, went to the liberated area. Wu read out the personality of Wei Tianlin from his painting, “vigorous, simple, and sincere, the painting is the man.”

　　The time Wu worked as a teacher in Qinghua University and Beijing Academy of Art was the time the literary workers were encouraged to obtain experiences of life from real life, and it became a common practice for painters to go outdoors to draw from life. From then, Wu began his “hard career of walking the roads with the heavy load of the painting box”. Within a few years, Wu visited various places of the country; and the remotest and happiest tour he had was that to Tibet, with Dong Xiwen and Shao Jinkun to draw from life, a tour arranged and funded by the China Artists Association. Under the influence of the climate of “a hundred flowers in bloom”, the landscape painting revived, and Wu was regarded as a painter devoted to landscape paintings, and he appeared in the painting circles as a landscape painter. This long, hard but interesting experience was crucial in his artistic career. Without the fruitful explorations of these years, the extreme leftist political storms that rose in the middle 1960s would absolutely put an end to his artistic life.

　　In 1964, the Beijing Municipal Government decided to close Beijing Academy of Arts. The teachers and students who had not yet graduated were transferred to the Central Academy of Crafts and Arts and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, with Wu and Wei Tianlin to the Central Academy of Crafts and Arts to work as teachers. This change was a greatest blow upon Wei Tianlin, and he believed, till the last days of his life, that all his personal disasters began when he was transferred to the Central Academy of Crafts and Arts. This, however, was the illusion that embedded his sense of frustration, the illusion that no one was willing to recall; he forgot that the time he was transferred to the Central Academy of Crafts and Arts was the time the Chinese political situation had a turning change in its course. In 1963, Mao Zedong gave the famous instruction for politics, “once class struggle is waged, things will go on well.” And Mao Zedong stated with clarity, “The struggle against revisionism should also include the issues in the ideology, and effort should be put into the areas of literature, art, drama and film.” And following these instructions, Mao Zedong, for two times, criticized the literary work in China severely, holding that the socialist remoulding “has by now taken little effect” in many literary institutions, and that all the associations under the Chinese Federation of Literary and Artistic Circles “on the whole did not act according to the policies of the Party.” [7] Immediately after the two criticisms, the literary and artistic circles began to pour forth open criticisms upon the representatives of various aspects and upon their works and ideas, the Central Academy of Crafts and Arts could not stay away from the movement. This was the cause of the sense of frustration of Wei Tianlin and other artists, and time came when Wu was forced to discontinue his explorations in art.

　　“The Great Cultural Revolution of the Proletariat Class” broke all connections between Wu and art, and he experienced house searching, property confiscating, public denouncing, quotation recitation, and suffering from a severe hepatitis. Before the climax of house searching, he destroyed all the pictures he painted when he studied in Paris. And in order to keep the other paintings away from misfortunes, he scattered them secretly in the houses of his relatives and friends, dreaming that some day after his death, these hidden paintings could be brought back to light again, back to people again. --In those dullest days, he and his wife Zhu Biqin helped each other like two landed fish each trying to save other with its own saliva, and in such help he experienced “boundless sorrows and endless comforts”.

　　In 1970, the teachers and students in Beijing institutions of higher education were ordered to leave the metropolis and go to the countryside to “receive the reeducation from the poor and lower-middle peasants”. Wu, together with the teachers and students of the Central Academy of Crafts and Arts, went to the countryside near Shijiazhuang of Hebei Province. As a “bourgeois intellectual”, he was someone to be remoulded in labour and someone held in lower regard than others, someone to take blame put and to face difficulties created. He was, however, fortunate because he was skilled with painting, and he was often sorted out to fulfill the painting tasks assigned by superior institutions. On such occasions, he could be bold and straight with his painting, though what he painted was not what he meant to express.

　　In the later years of the Great Cultural Revolution, the guard against and the control of intellectual were comparatively less forceful, and Wu immediately seized the chances to paint landscapes in the spare time from labour. And because he made his easel from a manure of the farmer, he was referred to as “the manure basket painter”. What was delighting was that the “manure basket painter”, the painter without the lawful identity of a painter, had rich gains in art, and his paintings began to display the simplicity and the sobriety which did not appear in prior works. In 1973, he and some other painters were transferred to make a great wall painting for Beijing Hotel, and before the actual painting, they went to the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River to draw from life. But as soon as they returned to Beijing, they encountered the “criticizing blacklist paintings” started by Jiang Qing, and the plan to invite these “bourgeois authorities” to make the wall painting discontinued. Yet, the travel became the beginning for his travels in succession to draw from life. In 1973, Wu and his wife returned successively from the countryside to their house to the north of the front of Shishahai Lake, and they cleaned the house covered in dust for years, with a feeling that, the miserable times would soon go over.

　　After his return to Beijing from the countryside, Wu altered his forms of artistic activities from two aspects. The one is that he began to work on waterink paintings and could never stop with the genre, making himself a painter of both waterink painting and oil painting. The other is that he began to pay attention to ideas of art and to give public expressions of his opinions of art, making himself an art critic most arresting in the fine art circles of China in the late 20th century.

　　The year 1978 was the year of ideological emancipation in China. In the spring of this year, the Communist Party of China began to “remove” the label of the rightists and to rehabilitate the people who suffered persecution in the prior political movements. What followed was the publication of “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth” [8]. And the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CPC declared renunciation of the slogans of “class struggle as the guideline” and “the continued revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat”, and translation of the stress of the CPC to the socialist construction. This Session became the starting point of the reform and opening of China, and the crucial point of Wu to obtain “emancipation” in art. When controversies were made over the statement “practice is the sole criterion for testing truth”, Wu wrote to his students, such as Ding Shaoguang, Liu Jude, Zhong Shuheng, saying, “I have great confidence in the bright future of the liberation war in fine art to overthrow conservative forces and to create new styles, and I hope that my fellow fighters march on forward with courage, to liberate themselves, and to liberate the slaves in the realm of fine art.” [9]

　　In 1978, the Central Academy of Crafts and Arts organized “Exhibition of Paintings by Wu Guanzhong”, which was the first personal exhibition after his return from abroad, and also the beginning of the successive exhibitions of his works over the country. In the spring of the next year, an exhibition of Wu’s painting was put on in the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. Reform and opening brought an unprecedented liberal climate to the artistic circles of China, and Wu eventually obtained the basic conditions for the pursuit of his artistic ideals. He worked on his paintings, and at the same time, he wrote and published articles concerning the situation of fine art in China. He cast doubt upon the meaning of the proposition “the content decides the form” in the actual creative activity of fine art, and made defenses of “formal beauty”, nude and abstract art, trying to prepare a foothold for modern art in China. He knew well that his opinions would offend some authorities of the fine art circles, but he continued with what he wished, disregarding all possible counteractions. In the preface to the album of the Fine Art Festival of Shenzhen, he wrote, “we are ambitious, --we have boarded on a pirate ship!”

　　There were various blames and ridicules, however, cast upon him, and the blames and ridicules very often had certain ideological background. The most striking case was the speech given by Jiang Feng at a meeting in September 1982. Jiang Feng the then Chairman of the China Artists Association, when criticizing the “liberalization” tendencies in the fine art circles, declared, “There are now a group of people taking a certain painter as their flag, who spares no effort to advocate the decadent fine art of modernistic schools of the West with contempt for the revolutionary fine art of ours, …and whose function is to disturb the correct direction of the development of the socialist fine art of ours …” [10] It is to be admitted that Jiang Feng acted with sensitivity: in the historical environment of the time, advocating artistic autonomy and casting doubt upon the principle of “the contents decides the form”, was actually a political appeal. Yet, Wu continued in a heedless way, and gave frank and complete statements of his emotions and thoughts. He made great achievements in painting; and it is in changing political and artistic climates, and with the courage and willpower of “art instead of life”, that he made such achievements.

　　Things changed with the passage of time. In the past twenty years, the assaults and ridicules upon Wu took no effect at all, but the base profit-driven forgers brought him irreparable losses in time and energy, wasting almost three years of his valuable time. Even though, Wu continued with his work in his own ways, painting, writing, and attending academic conferences in all weathers, and winning more and more appreciators with his innovative achievements. Wu, however, had a clear judgement of his works: for every artist, the works that can fully realize his artistic ideals make only a part of the total of his creations. In the autumn of 1991, he reexamined his paintings, and destroyed without any hesitation hundreds of them with which he was not content. Such self-examination and self-restraint were seldom found in the productive painters of China.

　　The 20th century men of literature and art, formed their humanistic attitudes and artistic styles, all in political and cultural turbulences and transformations. The May Fourth Movement and the Great Cultural Revolution were the amplified manifestations of these turbulences and transformations; different people were placed under different circumstances in these great historical events and had different responses, and therefore, they formed different ideological conceptions and psychological traits in art. Wu belongs in the Post-May-Fourth generation, and in the early years of their learning, they benefited much from the inspirations of the new cultural tides. The storms of wars and revolutions, however, delayed their growth, and in the years in which they could realize their ambitions, they were deprived of the best time for artistic development by continuous political movements; it was already in their middle and late years that they began to have the chances to realize their ideals.

　　Wu and the other intellectuals of his generation were different from their prior generation, in that most of them were not active participants in the social and political struggles, but passive adjustors to the historical turbulences. The intellectuals of this generation concerned themselves more with academic and artistic affairs and with social transformations. They, therefore, thought over and found solutions to the artistic problems, not in an ideological sense, but for the sake of artistic and academic advancement. Wu did not have grand cultural strategies to which the intellectual of the prior generation displayed much enthusiasm, but he went much farther in the exploration into art as an autonomous existence, farther not only than the painters of the generation of Kang Youwei, Xu Beihong, and Lin Fengmian, but also than many painters of his own generation. What he contributed to the contemporary art of China was not a “craftsmanship”, but an artistic individuality never twisted. He said, “Once people have mastered the technique, the technique will give way to the thought.” [11] The artistic progress of Wu was not the progress of obtaining a certain artistic technique or a certain “craftsmanship”, but the progress of ceaseless thinking.

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　　Wu stayed in the countryside in the south as a child, drifted from place to place in the war fires as a youth, and then went to Paris to receive education in Western art, --different cultural environments placed him in the process of continuous alterations and adaptations. Wu was different from many painters returning from Europe, in that he was never weakened in his artistic accomplishments, instead, he turned out to be an artist of greater progress, when he left the studio of the academy and broke away from the popular exercise model of the academy. He was a rare exception of the early students studying abroad, most of whom made their best achievements in painting in the studio of a European academy of fine art and progressed no further, with their studio exercise paintings as their representative works. The academy education, for Wu, was nothing but a starting point from which he ascended. The sensitivity to the formal structures and the brightness of light and colour displayed in his painting, seem to be the temperaments with which he was born. A foreign scholar of art history, after examining the works of the early Chinese artists of Western painting, gave the opinion that when Wu returned from Paris to China in the 1950s, he had, in colour and courage, outdone Xu Beihong and Liu Haisu, and even Lin Fengmian, his teacher.[12] There are, in China, probably few people agreeing to such straight-forward comments--the juniors could outdo the seniors! We might, in a restrained manner, interpret the comment not as the general judgement of their accomplishments in learning, but the particular evaluation of the “colour and courage” alone. As a matter of fact, Wu has indeed brilliant talent for colour and formal prosody, and the simple but exquisite watercolours he painted in Paris before he returned to China such as A Church in a Paris Suburb and A Village in a Paris Suburb (I, II) might well demonstrate the height he reached in his mastery of the formal laws of Western painting. Forty years later, he revisited Paris to draw from life, and in the paintings produced there, people might be easily arrested by the distinctive charm of Chinese art.

　　When Wu returned from Paris to Beijing, he was confronted with difficult choices, alterations and adaptations. The policy of “literature and art serve workers, peasants and soldiers, serve politics” was implemented with firm measures, and the workers of fine art were assigned well-defined tasks: “Participate, without preconditions, in the activities of the factory, the countryside and the military camp, and work together with the masses, to experience the progresses of the implementation of the common guidelines, from the construction processes in the economic, political, cultural and military areas, in order to make life-like reproductions of these progresses, as a measure to prevent the revival of non-realistic formalism.” [13]Gelasimov, the Chairman of the Soviet Association of Painters, expressed his concerns about the influences of the Western formalistic fine art upon China when he interviewed the Chinese artists visiting the Soviet Union, and warned his Chinese comrades of the fact that “the formalistic modernistic schools of painting planted by the rulers of the capitalist countries are the anti-revolutionary tools of the oppressors.” [14]The teachers and students at the academies of fine art in Beijing and Hangzhou were busy painting new Spring Festival pictures, and the new Spring Festival picture was not without formal requirements, “it takes striking colours, exciting and melodramatic structures, and clear and lively lines, …” [15]In the eyes of Wu, such works as these new Spring Festival pictures were “mostly far from being works of fine art, but pictorial illustrations of a certain kind.” [16]The works of fine art which he admired, however, were ranked among “the bourgeois formalistic” paintings.

　　Under such circumstances, Wu could not continue with his formal exploration at all. Therefore, on condition that he did not leave off his artistic ideals, he would abandon figure painting and choose landscape painting. And to be a “landscape painter” in the pan-political environment of that time, it took not only courage and perseverance, but also endurance to solitariness. In the middle and late 1950s, Wu stepped into his middle age, and began to be known for his painting style with striking traits of individuality. The paintings of this stage displayed more formal flavour of the traditional Chinese painting, and more consideration of the aesthetic appeals of the common people in the subject matter and formal treatment. Wu gave such a statement of his effort: “I tried my best to paint something realistic, beautiful and elegant, and as long as there was no denial of my central objectives, I tried my best to meet the appreciative needs of the middle and even the lower classes. This was a compromise objectively speaking, and subjectively, this was an effort made to appeal to both refined and popular tastes.” [17]His drawings from life in the Jinggang Mountains in 1959 and in Tibet in 1961 made the first impression of his art upon the fine art circles in China. People felt in those works a “beautiful and elegant” style. He did not deny his “central objectives”, instead, he, with brief and light touches, achieved exquisite treatment of colour and formal rhythm, in a quite different way from the current paintings of thematic and melodramatic contents that “serve the policies”. From these drawings from life, the fine art circles in China gradually recognized the genuine style of Wu. Ai Zhongxin, in his The Charms of Oil Paintings, an influential treatise, said, “Wu, who paid much attention to the exquisiteness of stroke and ink, in his landscape paintings of recent years, gradually revealed his sense of music in oil colours and brush techniques.” [18] Ai Zhongxin, in this treatise of his, did not take Wu as one of his central objects of treatment, because, Wu was then a painter outside the mainstream art.

　　It was the sensitivity to colours and rhythm of dots and lines that excelled Wu in art. The greatest meaning of the subject matter to him was that it was something from which Wu could seek formal beauty; no matter whether it was the open plain, or the corner of the paddy field, he could always detect and construct structural relations of the form. He liked mulberry gardens, because they were “structural pictures of thick interwoven lines”; he liked daisies in the open field, because he could “gather with his eyes the spirits often in company of weeds and rocks”; he liked to draw on the boat flocks of geese from life, because it was to “capture white blocks of life”; he liked to run among mountainside paddies, because there he could search for, choose, match and organize compositions that were both suitable for and reasonable in paintings”, --These made Wu’s paintings apparently different from those of the mainstream painters of his time; he never painted to publicize a certain policy, or to express a certain idea, or to commemorate a certain event, but to explore the formal possibilities of the painting, to elevate emotional tones and to develop conceptual perspectives, with the state of mind “freed from all bondages of objective interests”.[19] Such ideas of art of his, endure and survive erosions of all weathers. The landscape paintings he produced in the late years of “the Great Cultural Revolution”, demonstrated further his pursuits in art. The open fields in the north, which seemed monotonous to him in the past, after long familiarization and intimate connection, was no more monotonous; instead, it was “pure, simple, and magnificently straightforward”, and those water trenches and farming yards, appeared in his paintings as something full of charm and character. A line of verse of an ancient philosopher reads “all things are self-contained to people who observe in tranquility”; the crops, the woods, the birds, the wild weeds and the idle flowers are self-contained for their beauty of natural content, once they are discovered and interpreted by the painters, they present formal beauty appealing to viewers. In the early 1970s, Wu’s paintings began to bear colourings of sobriety and simplicity, qualities added to purity and clarity; and integration of simplicity, sobriety, purity and clarity marked an important change in his art. This change was displayed most apparently in the field drawings from life produced from 1972 to 1974.

　　From the middle 1970s on, Wu began tour drawing from life, and finished a big amount of landscape pictures. In the oil landscapes reproducing the attractions of different regions and different manners, his objectives were manifested with increasing determinacy. He, with special sensitivity to visual forms, captured with great boldness the landscapes that best possess formal properties, purified the relations between the physical structures and the colours within the scenery objects themselves, stressed the expressiveness of free and changing strokes and colour tones, giving his paintings bearings of simplicity and changeability, and making them full of vitality and dynamism. From the pictures of Lu Xun’s hometown and the red chambers in Qingdao painted from 1975 to 1978, and Highland Households, The Mainstream, Homes, and Fish in Play painted in the 1980s, the viewer might detect a certain type of musicality, that is, the rhythm and prosody formed of the dots, the lines, the planes, and the colours. A certain Western critic holds that all painters were and are actually pursuing new abstract structures, new but pure formal significances, new models of authentic structures coming from the physical visual properties themselves, new forms of colour textures. [20] The viewer might experience such pursuits in the paintings of Wu, but these pursuits are just intermediate steps of his ultimate pursuits; he was pursuing conceptual perspectives by way of the form: “I love the conceptual perspective in painting; the conceptual perspective is to be integrated into the formal beauty, and it is presented by way of form. To unfold the conceptual perspective of the image with the eyes of painting, it is the core of my career in art …” [21]

　　The stylistic change in Wu’s oil paintings in the 1980s occurred at the same time with the innovation in his waterink paintings, and this Chinese flavour that transcended the genre features marked the harvest of the painter who laboured in the two nurseries, one of the oil painting, and the other of the waterink painting. There are many of the Chinese oil painters who are good at the waterink painting, but very few like Wu who always work on both. Wu held that, “nationalization of the oil painting and modernization of the Chinese painting are actually twin brothers, when I met with a problem with no solution in the oil painting, I transplanted in into the waterink and I found it well solved. In the same way, when I met with a problem beyond solution in the waterink, I would try it in the oil …” [22] In his paintings, the viewer can find many twins, on the same subject matter, with the same composition, but in two forms, the one in oil, and the other in waterink. He, with this method of comparison and transplantation, continued to enrich the expressive powers of the two tool materials and the two pictorial forms. This endeavour is different in nature from the practice of the classical Western painters working on the same composition with the oil, the plate and the drawing; the plate or drawing pictures of theirs are often the preparatory drafts of the oil, or the copies of the finished oil. Wu was seeking for communications and transplantations of the pictorial languages between two different pictorial media, based upon two different cultures. Such creative experiment, in the eyes of Wu, was creation based upon the same idea of art, as was stated, “my way is expressed as one principle.” The passage to Paris in 1989, brought him subject matter for many paintings of freshness and refinement, and these oil paintings were, to a great extent, the results of his experimental explorations in the areas of the oil and the waterink. Comparing these paintings with the watercolours he painted in his early years in Paris, the viewer might well find how far he had travelled in his experimental journey in the two genres of art, the Chinese and the Western. These paintings produced in 1989 contain greatest possible charm of ink and wash, and such paintings as A Monument in the Street Corner, A Garden of Versailles, and Fontainebleau, are virtually oils splashed in the manner of the waterink stroke. Yet, Wu neither sacrificed the expressiveness of the oil colours because of the employment of the Chinese stroke, nor weakened the poetic quality of the Chinese art because of the expression of the atmospheres of the French culture.

　　With the Paris pictures as a signal, Wu, in the 1990s, painted on the subject matters of England, Japan, Indonesia, North Europe, --making a feature series of exotic manners in the eyes of a Chinese artist. These paintings are not the mere records of foreign scenic attractions, but the extensions of the artist’s domestic explorations into the formal beauty of the painting, and the continuations of the artist’s deliberate examinations of the expressive features of the pictorial media of the waterink and the oil. The colour and form compositions that are completely different from that of the water country in the south and that of the yellow earth plateau in the north provided Wu with another possibility for experiment. The thick black of the great thatch roofs of the village cottages in England, the striking contrasts of the Japanese fishing harbour formed of the mountains, the sea and the ships, the night of the North European harbour lighted with lamps, torches, stars and the moon, the oceans of Indonesia under the rays of the tropic sun, --all these contain special flavours of their own, but, they are each like a beautiful libretto, which waits for an emotional throat to bring it to a new life.

　　The oil paintings produced from the 1990s on, such as Leaping, White Flowers, Flowers of Evil, Remaining Lotus Flowers in Ice and Snow, A Home of Bitter Gourds, Towards the Lotus Pond, and The Hook of a Crescent, present unconstrained brush movement but concealed intention, simplified formal construction but deep emotional content, attaining unfailing charms. Paintings such as The Yellow River, Roaring, Red Lotus Flowers, A Former Homestead，and Springs and Autumns in the Lotus Pond，display smooth brush movement and free ink application. Houses with white walls and black tiles and bright flowers with tensile grasses, are very often taken as subject matters of his paintings, forming contrasts between paintings of different times. Lu Xun’s Hometown painted in 1977 and A Former Homestead in 1997 reproduce similar sceneries, presenting marked contrast between two situations, the transparence and refinement of the former and the vigorousness and robustness of the latter. The painter was filled with nostalgia for and sorrow about his former homestead, so that he often “wanted unconsciously to express the sense of melancholy between the black and the white”, and with the increase of experiences of life this melancholy tended to be deep-soul feeling. Bird’s-eye views of house clusters are repeated subject matters of Wu’s paintings; and The Ancient Town of Lijiang at the Foot of the Yulong Mountains painted in 2003, for instance, is composed of black, white and grey, but has a manner of dignity and profundity. Such a manner is not only the result of technical improvement and formal development, but also the reflection of the change of the state of mind, just like the great river heading its way out of mountains and gullies, the great river that is open, unfolding, and extensive.

　　Wu turned up in the circles of artists of China as an oil painter. As a person who, out of voluntary personal choice, decided to take painting as his objective of learning and living, Wu presented much more aspiring temperament of independence and self-reliance than many of his fellow artists. And in painting, he transcended the regional property of the subject matter; no matter whether it was the country field in the north or the village town in the south, the street in Paris or the scenery of Southeast Asia, it was depicted in his painting with strong Chinese flavour and Chinese bearing. The tone of simplicity and tranquility in the watercolours and oils he painted in the 1970s, and the style of splendeur and profundity in the 1990s, all revealed that the painter tended to be increasingly free in the state of mind. This state of mind in painting stood in total contrast to such trends current in the painting circles as studied-ness and self-centeredness by way of religious and philosophical symbolism.

　　Wu turned from the “foreign painting” to the waterink painting in the 1970s. Of the painters of his generation who studied in and returned from foreign countries, Wu seemed to be the only one who persisted with oil painting, and with continued artistic experiments in waterink. Unlike those painters who “returned” from the oil painting to the waterink painting, he did not return from intensity to calmness, but went to new intensity--he wanted to seek for the spirit of the Chinese culture under the conditions that are far from the brush technique and the compositional stereotypes of the traditional Chinese painting. Wu’s waterink paintings first appeared in front of the fine art circles in China on the Exhibition of Wu Guanzhong’s Paintings in 1979 in the National Museum of Art. That was the time when the Chinese people had just come back to life from the nightmares of the extreme leftist control, when they began to have high hopes for reform and opening, when most of them did not find changes in art irritating but instead found it pleasing that artists could break through the conventions. Wu’s waterink paintings exhibited unfolded a world that was different from that of the past, glowing with the splendour of life and overflowing with the vigour of life. A Mountain Village and Spring Shoots Among Bamboos present views either full of taro shoots of fresh and tender green or full of new bamboo shoots breaking through the soil, manifesting the blissful awakening of life of nature; and to the viewers who had just freed themselves from heavy pressures, these might well excite associations concerning the history, the society and the fate of their own. Such waterink landscapes as The Dazhu River of Sichuan, Reminiscences of Xishuangbanna and The Riverside Jungle construct the thick profusion of colours of mountain woods and water areas, with the texturing of colour strips and lines. These paintings contain plenty of details of the landscapes, but they exhibit the tendencies of simplification and abstraction, as the looping line structures in Home Country Bamboo Shoots, and the distant mountains and glows outlined with smooth lines in A Small Riverside Town in Guizhou.

　　Quick advancement in the waterink painting formed an important part of the artistic harvest of Wu in the 1980s. And Wu gave treatment of landscapes in the bulk of his waterink paintings, and of the birds, beasts, flowers and grasses in only a few. Wu made the choice of the subject matters with consideration of their formal structural features, and he liked those scenic spots which allowed him to bring into full play the density, force, prosody and rhythm of the waterink dots and lines. The rolling of mountains, the forking of grasses and trees, the texturing of rocks, and the scattering of the houses, …all these might best excite Wu’s inspiration for painting. His treatment of these scenic objects is quite different from the norm followed by the traditional waterink painter. Take the mountains for example, the ancient painter placed stress on the ethical significance of the mountains, and they believed that the mountains were symbols of sublimity, solemnity and eternality, so that they tried to “capture the bones of the mountains” or to “capture the temperaments of the mountains”. The mountains, in the eyes of Wu, however, contain inexhaustible prosodic activity of life, and it might be said that Wu captured the prosody of the mountains. This prosody is not the quality that the mountains in nature possess naturally, but the enthusiasm of the painter aroused by the mountains to express the prosody of dots and lines with black, white, grey and other colours, and the paintings are the records of such enthusiasm. This process is similar to the music composition--the composer is moved by something, and composes a work of music and titles it after that, but the core of the work is not the thing itself. What moves the listener, is the pitches, the melody and the rhythm textured from the imagination and the organization of the composer. Many of Wu’s paintings attract the viewer, not because he reproduced in them the objective states of the objects as they are in nature, but because he represented in them the traces from which the viewer might experience the activity of life.

　　After longtime prodigious but painstaking activities of drawing from life, Wu advanced into a brave new realm of art. He, like all painters in the history of painting, recollected, imagined, and brought his brush to full play in his studio. Wu estimated his own creative activities of this period of time, saying, “By the 1980s, the waterink had become the major means of my painting, and the waterink pictures tended to outdo the oil ones in both quantity and quality, --the skills in the oil painting obtained in the past forty years became the stepping stone to the waterink.” The freedom he achieved in the waterink painting is the freedom he obtained after his tours north and south, his searchings east and west, and his explorations up and down. He differed from the painters of the prior generations in that he wanted to go beyond the traditional brush movement and ink application and the traditional pictorial stereotyping, and to pursue the emotional states developing naturally from the cultural spirit of China. Wu did not believe that deviation from the technical experiences of the prior painters would impair the continuity of the artistic tradition of China, instead, he held that such deviation would be accepted to more and more modern-day people. It was proved that though his waterink paintings are far from the traditional norms of painting as far as the techniques and the compositions are concerned, he corresponded to the waterink masters of the prior generations in artistic spirit. If we do not regard the great waterink art merely as a technique or a craftsmanship, but as a spiritual activity of creation, we will come to the fact that Wu never deviates from the spirit of Chinese art.

　　By the early 1980s, Wu had acquired smoother and more forceful employment of his painting brush, and he would capture the melody of the movement of life in painting objects of various kinds. He acted in a careless and liberal state of mind in the waterink world, reproducing snow-capped mountains and boundless deserts with extremely simplified and fluid lines; depicting ancient trees, the Great Wall and homesteads with water-saturated black, white and grey; representing the vicissitudes of the cultural sites in the border areas with treatments either extremely complicated or extremely simplified. By the middle 1980s, Wu had already reached the borderline between the concrete and the abstract. He had found a stylistic approach of his own, and that was a road of development from fairness and meticulousness to joyousness and unrestrainedness. Paintings such as Spring Snow (1982) and The Pine Soul (1984) came out to mark Wu’s stylistic maturity in the waterink painting. And such paintings as The Great River Flowing Eastwards (1984), The Yellow River Flowing Eastwards (1986), Clouds Amidst the Mountains (1988), The Former House of Qiu Jin (1988) appeared in succession to the viewers, showing that Wu, in his explorations in the waterink area, had reached the state of “moving without objects, yet obtaining within them”.

　　Mountains and trees are always objects of chanting and eulogizing to the literati and the painters, and Wu has a stronger and more special affection to mountains and trees. The Pine Soul, A Cypress on the Yulong Mountains, and other paintings on ancient trees, unfold the formal beauty of these trees, and, what it more, contain Wu’s eulogizing of the lofty manners and the persistent vitality of theirs. Wu began to work on The Pine Soul in the early 1980s. He once climbed the Tai Mountains, to draw the “Wudafu Pine” which the legend says is an ancient pine from the Qin Dynasty, from life to represent its spirit, but the “Wudafu Pine” was not as majestic in nature as it was in his imagination. Later he painted a large picture of the “Wudafu Pine”, but still, he was not satisfied. On an unexpected occasion, the “Wudafu Pine” reminded Wu of The Burghers of Calais by Rodin, and the indomitable warrior in the natural world and the indomitable warriors in the human history presented two types of images which impacted on and integrated in his mind; and after that, what he fermented in his mind was not the specific tree any longer, but the movement of life that exhibits a certain power of personality. “I tried to capture the soul of the pine, and tried to represent its struggling and curving with wild ink lines, with lines in continuous motion pressing for its flying and impacting soul. The dull cliffs hang down in piles; the tranquil straight lines in grey stand in contrast to the curving and surging lines in ink, and they collide and occlude, and splash in their combating colour sparks all over the mountains. Are the colour sparks the remains of the chaotic times?” [23] From the painting notes of the painter himself, the viewer might well understand the whole process of the formation of this picture which “tends to be abstract”, and understand that Wu never deviated from the spiritual powers of the pine in the mind of the traditional Chinese literati and took into consideration the formal construction of the pine alone. Wu often reminded himself to keep “the kite thread fixed”, that is, to keep his painting and the realistic world connected, and not to let broken the connections between the pictorial images and the natural objects. He observed that The Pine Soul had put the “thread on the verge of breaking”. It seemed the case as far as the pictorial image was concerned; however, as far as the understanding and the expression of the painting object are concerned, The Pine Soul, and The Hua Mountains at Sunset (1997) do not reveal any deviation from the soul of the Chinese culture. For thousands of years, the Chinese poets and painters have been thus observing and representing the character and the power of the pine, and imagining and evaluating the soul of the pine. Wu did not digress from the train of thought of the traditional culture, and followed the train of thought even when he applied treatment to the red firs of North America and the great trees on the Californian coast. In his eyes, the great trees distorted by the winds from the sea are “just like struggling pines of the Huang Mountains”, and “people of different countries always have affinities in emotions”. Such is the idea Wu has always stressed.

　　A Mountain of Colours painted in 1988, A Village in the Wuyi Mountains in 1988 and Snowcapped Mountains, turned out to be simpler and more delicate than the paintings of the middle 1980s, in the overall composition, the application of black, white and grey, and the employment of dots, lines and planes. Spring Mountains in Red and Ink painted in 1986 represents the contours of the mountains and the courses of the waters, with fluid lines in black or red, forming actually a variant of the abstract waterink painting. Some ancients scholars climbed the mountains and looked upon the contours of the rolling mountains, and imagined that the contours were formed of the sea waves freezing. Shi Tao, observing the rolling mountains with piling peaks and the deep gullies with hanging cliffs, formed the opinion that “the mountains are the seas, and the seas are the mountains”. Wu believed that “the painters place great stress on representing the beauty of the rolling, the overlapping, or the boundless, but they don’t care to tell whether they are the mountains or the seas.”[24] He produced many paintings to represent the flowing mountains and waters with unbroken waving lines of the same kind, that is, to represent the visual identity concerning the mountains and the waters, with the abstract devices of painting.

　　Clouds Amidst the Mountains, The Former House of Qiu Jin, and Wisteria produced in 1988 were the signposts to where “the painter falls into the net of lines, --and where the lines crisscross, fall and rise, and gallop in an unstrained way in the emotional world.”[25] The structures of the mountains and gullies of the yellow earth plateau excited Wu’s associations of the hiding dragons and the slumbering tigers, and representing the yellow earth plateau as groups of tigers preparing to hunt was his experiment of extracting images from natural experiences. A Dream in the Daytime (1991) appeared, in the eyes of the critics, to mark the eventual breaking of the thread of the kite of Wu, but Wu himself did not regard it as a pure abstract painting, as he said, “I can not do with dreams”! Such abstract paintings as Alienation, Gone with the Wind, The Wu Family Workshop, and A Passage of Years came out in 1992 in succession, when Wu was no longer strict about what is abstract and what is not abstract, “if there is no obviously concrete object seen, one might say it is an abstract picture”. Wu, however, had deeper considerations, “it was because the painter wonders in the upper, the lower, the left and the right parts of the space, in the earlier and the later parts of the memory, and wants to represent the passage of years beyond capturing”.[26] Wu gave repeated treatment of the old houses in the south and the swallows in pairs, and paintings as A Pair of Swallows, The Former House of Qiu Jin, Reminiscences of the South (also entitled The Bygones Are Fading, The Pair of Swallows are Flying Away) of 1996, --reproduce the houses in the south with abstract block and plane structures, but he himself realized that “the geometrical compositions that are nearly abstract and the interwoven and entangled complexes, as a matter of fact, have that remote origins in the extensions of the concrete images”.[27] And, they have origins also in his “south complex”, in the water countries with black tiles and white walls, in the wisteria climbing or winding, --and it is for these that he had strong preferences. In these thematic areas, he differed much from the abstract painters of the West, in that the cultural memories work as the irremovable ground for his creation, and in that the traditional cultural memories and aesthetic conceptions of China lie hidden in the depth of his mind. This difference did not hinder him from progressing in artistic innovations; instead, it was beneficial to him in the formation of his individual style. Wu often stressed that he observed and selected the mountains, the waters, the buildings and the plants from the perspectives of formal structures. Yet, examining his selections generally, the viewer might find that, beside the formal concerns, Wu had other concerns; he never deviated from the nature conception of the traditional Chinese culture, that is, the ethical and the metaphorical attitudes, and it was with this cultural psychology that he observed and applied treatment to the natural objects. The mountains, the waters, the pines, the lotus flowers, and the fair and the neighbourhood of his home country, --whatever subject matter it was, even when he was approaching the abstract, he always based his artistic activities upon such a state of mind which has its origin in the Chinese culture.

　　In the last 10 years of the 20th century, Wu was already in the state of “doing whatever he likes without violating the rules” in waterink painting, and his “rules” here were his own artistic pursuits and artistic beliefs. In the waves of criticisms, Wu continued to experiment for all possibilities to represent formal beauty and circumstances. Spring Snow produced in 1996, The Yellow River and A Passage of Years in 1997, A Free Movement in 1998, Marriage Ties on the Wall in 1999, …, all constitute “holistic” pictorial vision with tender and fluid lines. Wu’s “holistic” vision is poetic, unlike that of Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey who aimed not at the expression of any thought or conceptual perspective, but at the decorative effect of the “full vision”. Wu, with changeable brush movement, constructed meticulous but transparent spaces of expressiveness. All his “holistic” formal treatments represent thematic situations related to the forms: Spring Snow, crystal and white, melting and flowing; The Yellow River, representing not only the motion and the formation of the torrents, but also the colours of the muddy waves and the rocks; Marriage Ties on the Wall, freezing the “momentary embrace” of the solid lines of the vines and the void shadows of the trees, --Here, Wu responded once again to “the kite thread fixed”, which is actually a correspondence in the “spiraling” ascension.

　　Wu once said that, he never designed his style, never tried to retain his s