The 1990s was a decade of progressive globalization of the economy and culture. For most people who cherish their national cultural traditions, economic globalization is acceptable, but when it comes to increasingly close global exchange of culture, they are apprehensive concerning the loss of national cultural identity. Within such a social milieu, some intellectuals argue that Chinese traditional culture should be mined to fight cultural globalization, however, despite their good intentions this has resulted in a wave of nationalism and skepticism regarding the exchange between Chinese and foreign cultures. Artist Xu Jiang argues that: “If cultural discrepancies are uncritically advocated to fabricate a cultural otherness to enrich a’global concept’ and ‘cultural pluralism’, then pluralism and globalism can hardly be distinguished from cultural separatism. In this, cultural separatism and fundamentalism are no more than two sides of the same coin.”[1] Wu Guanzhong fostered an in-depth perspective in regard to this issue very early on. In the 1990s, a decade of progressive opening up, he was levelheaded, aware that learning from the west and adherence to the Chinese artistic tradition are not necessarily antagonistic. What is important is the route and approach to learning. He favors the propositions put forward by Taiwan poet Yu Guangzhong: “We shall not explore the scarce mineral reserves left over by westerners. Rather, we should learn their state-of-the-art exploration technology to explore our own mineral reserves.” Wu Guanzhong points out that 20th century western art came into flower on the soil absorbing oriental and African nutrients. Hence, we should also absorb western nutrients to develop our own arts but should never follow the west; rather, we should blaze a trail typical of the Chinese arts.[2]

　　The visual field for Chinese oil painting in the 1990s was increasingly expansive in a period dominated by the progressive opening up of economy and culture as well as the cross-border communication of information. The space for further development of Chinese oil painting is limited if Chinese oil painters just copy and learn from one another domestically in a closed environment. Within the current social backdrop of global cultural exchange, arts of various forms are not exchangeable unless they share some universal traits that exceed their own nationality and country. Wu Guanzhong’s oil paintings of the 1990s ushered in a more expansive and free visual field and artistic conception like the pouring of rivers into the sea. His art in this period was devoted to a profound exploration and reflection of actual living situations, rather than merely dabbling at form and aesthetics in a general sense. Wu Guanzhong, like his mentor Lin Fengmian in his later life, put aside his personal material gains and riveted his eyes on deep human nature from a historical perspective. As such, we may understand why Wu Guanzhong’s oil paintings of the 1990s are broadminded and composed, eclectic and versatile in terms of artistic language and approach while rustic and innocent in terms of spirit. His love for life and people as well as passion for art can be clearly understood through his oil paintings.

　　01 Main features of Wu Guanzhong’s art

　　Wu Guanzhong’s basic artistic philosophy cannot be neglected in research regarding his oil paintings of the 1990s. As a matter of fact, it is his unique artistic perspective and increasingly clear artistic philosophy that fostered unswerving faith and extensive exploration for his creations of the 1990s.

　　Wu Guanzhong’s research into and energetic advocacy of “beauty in form” and “beauty in abstractness” in the 1970s established his status as a trailblazer leading Chinese contemporary art into modern times. Through his personal implementation of the aforesaid theory, Wu Guanzhong carried Chinese modern water-ink painting fathered by Lin Fengmian into the 20th century and become a respected bellwether in the transition of Chinese fine art to modern times in the 1980s.

　　Wu Guanzhong’s art of the 1990s maintains an unfailingly subtle balance between perceptivity and rationality. The abstractness of nature Wu created, metaphors of scenery, can only be appreciated in light of the sincerity he cherished in his heart. His art shows that he is aesthetically sensitive to nature and formally sensitive to art. Rather than regard the relationship between art and society as well as artist and aesthetic target simply as reproduction and description, Wu Guanzhong deems them to be in a complex relationship between art, society and the artist’s emotions by virtue of the refining and sublimation of form.

　　The formal elements in Wu Guanzhong’s arts, that share an intrinsic commonality, are embodied in his oil paintings and water-ink paintings. It is safe for us to regard Wu Guanzhong’s art as a kind of lyrical abstraction, which helps him find happiness and releases his joy and misery in life directly. Wu Guanzhong constructs through colors a space for his existence that facilitates the continuation and growth of his life. The quick and decisive painting actions evinced in his works, unfailingly stimulated by the artist’s sudden intuitional perception of nature and spontaneous outburst of emotions as well as the strong desire to release them, are not short of intrinsic spiritual coherence.

　　Wu Guanzhong’s art in the 1990s “shuttled” between east and west to acquire wisdom and balance. If we take “modernity” as the main thread for the development of Chinese paintings in the 20th century, then today nobody will doubt that blending east and west is one of the most effective approaches to the innovation of Chinese arts in the 20th century. Despite that we have begun to be introspective in regard to the history of ushering in western style artistic education into China since the May Fourth Movement, Chinese arts like its economy cannot close itself and refuse to open up to the external world. Wu Guanzong created his paintings in the 1990s with the mindset of a citizen of a large country increasingly opening up. He explored with perseverance an individualized, modernized and nationalized Chinese art, which continues the innovative trail he blazed in the 1980s.

　　The above-mentioned features all find their way to Wu Guanzhong’s arts of the 1990s, becoming channels to appreciate and understand his oil paintings in that period.

　　02 Wu Guanzhong’s oil paintings in the 1990s

　　i) Expansive and Free Perspective

　　In the early 1990s, Wu Guanzhong was invited to paint and hold exhibitions in various parts of the world like France, Japan, Britain and Indonesia, among others. He is the first Chinese artist invited by the British Museum to hold an individual exhibition, which indicates the importance the world attaches to China. Since then, Wu Guanzhong had the opportunity to visit various countries in the world and make contact with different nationalities and plural cultures. Wu Guanzhong felt deeply the beauty of the diversity of the world through his contact with people and scenery of different countries. His cultural perspective was substantially widened, hence the artistic philosophy he fostered as early as when he was studying in France was awakened, namely, “Excellent arts can cross the borders of different cultures and provoke resonance in the hearts of people of all countries.” Bathing in and enlightened by different geographical landscapes and the local customs of various countries, he discovered the beauty of different cultures and made many excellent works that have a unique perspective. We can understand his ceaseless traveling and artistic diligence just from the titles of his works created in this period, like An Indoor Scene of a Pub in England (1992), Mount Fuji (1993), A Fishing Harbour in Japan (1993), A Harbour of Norway (1994), A Small Market in Indonesia (1994), among others. The domestic Chinese style Wu Guanzhong fostered in his works also found its way into these paintings, but due to the limited time available for their creation more stress was laid on the overall impression of sceneries and people, especially the impression of color. Take A Fleet of Boats in Indonesia (1994) as an example. The painting can be described as a joyous abstract dance, in which Wu Guanzhong expresses multitudes of fishing boats through rich color and expressive brush strokes and gives free play to colors like red, blue, green, black and white. In A Town in Circles (1994), he presents an abstract scene boasting textural beauty through the interplay and overlapping of different colors and brush strokes.

　　ii) Poetic City

　　The 1990s was a historical period that witnessed the rapid development of cities in China. With the exodus of farmers into cities, towns like Yiwu in Zhejiang province, and Dongguan in Guangdong province mushroomed into prosperous commercial cities and China stepped into the historical process of urbanization at an unprecedented rate. Compared with the 1970s, Wu Guanzhong switched his attention from the depiction of rural scenery to the observation and expression of the urban landscape in this period. It is safe to say that Wu Guanzhong is one of the few domestic artists who attach importance to urban aesthetics and the artistic expression of cities very early. The concept of “Urban Mountain-Water Painting” was put forward in the late 1990s when the International Biennial Exhibition of Water-Ink Paintings was held in Shenzhen, but Wu Guanzhong was more aesthetically sensitive in that he had put the expression of cities into the hold of his brush much earlier. In The Labyrinth of Hongkong(1992), the dense skyscrapers in the sunlight are presented in a planar way and become targets for aesthetics. In A Metropolis (1994), the elevated roads are remindful of meandering rivers while skyscrapers end up being a precipitous range of mountains. The mountain-water image Wu Guanzhong endows urban skyscrapers with through his large brush stroke is not constrained by the exterior and measurement of the architecture itself. He even does not take into account the structure of buildings in that, from the perspective of formal beauty, tall buildings are nothing but mountains while roads are no more than rivers. The plane silver-gray image he employs in urban paintings dilutes the depressive feeling that urban building clusters inflict on the psychology of people and prompts us to look at the artifacts created by the human being from a different perspective. Meanwhile, he also attaches importance to highlighting subjective impression and priority in the panoramic depiction of the urban landscape. Distinctive from his oil paintings in the 1970s that highlight overall harmony through control of their constitutive parts, Wu Guanzhong’s oil paintings in this period intensified the beauty of richness of parts, set off in the overall gray tint. Wu Guanzhong does not consciously make a distinction between city and country because poetic beauty can be found in both.

　　iii) Beauty of Contrast

　　“Beauty of Contrast” is a thread running through the paintings Wu Guanzhong created in the 1990s. He is a master of the beauty of contrast to be drawn between square and circle, light and shade, cold and warm, dot and line, line and facet, density and scarcity as well as horizontal and vertical, and that can be traced everywhere in his paintings. He is like a conductor of an orchestra, at home in the maintenance of subtle balance and harmony. Some of his works like Dots and Lines Greet Spring (1996) directly show where his visual interests lie while A Village in England (1992), which is about England, also expresses the vertical and horizontal feeling in the planar surface. In A Country Homestead in England (1992), the even-painted roofs end up composed and poised and the thin and elastic lines employed in it suggest a kind of sensitivity and vividness. Hometown of Shakespeare (1992), a texture of horizontal, vertical and oblique lines brimming with musical rhythms, boasts the same artistic effects as the houses he painted in the water country south of the Yangtze River despite the different artistic approaches. The images he paints in effect have been highly generalized from specific objects, or, alternately, the houses he paints are not specific houses. Rather, they are the frameworks of houses, which, rather than simply derive from an architect’s blueprint, demonstrate the artist’s eulogy and analyze the formal beauty created by the human being. His paintings are the crystallization of his vivid experience of scenes cherished in his heart, expressing his discovery and creation of formal beauty. Wu Guanzhong is like the conductor of a symphony orchestra, giving ears to music of various genres.

　　iv) Dance of Abstraction

　　One distinctive feature evinced from the paintings Wu Guanzhong created in the 1990s is the increasing intensification of abstract factors in the pictures. If it can be said that he paid sufficient attention to draft paintings in his creative process in the past to facilitate expression of verve through form, then he is now more like a traveler treading along mountain roads, walking and resting alternately to facilitate expression of form through idea and expression of verve through form. He is like an intrepid warrior, once again stepping to the frontline of contemporary artistic creation. Despite that the aforesaid features are characteristic of his water-ink paintings in this period, in fact they find their way to his arts of various genres, ending up becoming pipelines for us to appreciate and understand Wu Guanzhong’s oil paintings in the 1990s. Wu Guanzhong produced numerous water-ink paintings in this period that also witnessed the full blossoming of his theoretical exploration in oil painting initiated in the 1980s. Realistic painting and abstract painting are brought into full play in the form of specific objects, images and abstract images. If Wu Guanzhong’s theory of “Kite shall never desert its line” can be defined as illustrating the relationship between art and life, then, in terms of artistic language, this theory can be rightly interpreted as expounding the relationship between abstract presentation and concrete presentation in Wu Guanzhong’s paintings as well. If Night Café (1994) is conceived of as merely approximating abstraction in that mottled colors retain the quality of realistic life and are not purely abstract chromatic patches, then A Fleet of Boats in Indonesia (1994), consisting of red, blue, green, black and white lines on canvas, can be regarded as the joyous dance of abstractness. Wu Guanzhong embarked on his journey of abstract painting from different aspects of artistic language. A Town in Circles (1994) dabbles at the feeling of heaviness and gravity arising from overlapping different brush strokes, while in Birch Trees (1998) part of the poplar trunk is magnified to exhibit its abstractness. The Former House of Qiu Jin (2002) explores artistic structure featuring the feel of contemporariness and in Huanghe River, the artistic conception of the bellowing water in Huanghe River is expressed in a highly abstract way. Uncarved Jasper (2002), which simply consists of several brightly painted green patches, already borders purely abstract painting.

　　v) Reinterpretation of Traditions

　　Wu Guanzhong created Series of Renewals of Ancient Flavours in 1996. He chose noted paintings of the Tang Dynasty and the Song Dynasty like Five Oxen, Lyceum and Ladies, among others, and recreated them in the form of oil painting. This further illustrates that his art is a blend of oriental and occidental paintings. They are the reinterpretation of Chinese ancient paintings and painting reviews. Despite that Wu Guanzhong as an artist valued time as gold, he did research on and wrote about with great interest and perseverance Painting Reviews by Shitao, a masterpiece universally received in the fine arts review circle as rich and erudite in content. This can be rightly understood as Wu Guanzhong’s incessant tracing back to the fountains of traditional arts in his long artistic career to absorb inspiration for artistic creation. Like Wu Guanzhong, Picasso, after achieving great artistic accomplishments in his mid-life, also resorted to periodic research on and imitation of Western classical paintings to acquire momentum for modernist innovation.

　　Wu Guanzhong’s review and research with respect to Chinese traditional arts facilitate his in-depth understanding of the spirit inherent in the Chinese arts. His understanding of the spirit intrinsic to Chinese traditional arts has fostered in his oil paintings the verve of Chinese water-ink painting rather than a superficial imitation of Chinese traditional paintings. His Springs and Autumns in the Lotus Pond (1996) is an impressive and touching contemporary oil painting most naturally evincing the verve of Chinese water-ink painting.

　　vi) Solicitude for Life

　　To Wu Guanzhong, the 1990s was an eventful decade full of ups and downs. The serious disease his wife, Zhu Biqin, suffered in this period had a substantial impact on him. The artist, who always values art as life and is indifferent to the vicissitudes of worldly life, experienced the fragility and preciousness of life in the process of his wife falling ill, her hospitalization and then difficult recovery. This experience found its way to his paintings of the 1990s, which give profound expression to ordinary natural life from a new perspective. In Banyan and Lotus (1994), both banyan and lotus, symbolic of longevity and transience respectively, pour out natural vitality and the colorful parrots perching on their branches are like flowers in blossom. The rollicking and capering fishes in the sea, beautiful Lijiang River and bamboos with their elastic stems on its bank all find its way to Wu Guanzhong’s paintings. In Disappearing Alley (1994), the treetops stretching out from behind walls are metaphorical of irresistible life. Autumn Scenery on the Wall (1994) can be regarded as representative of his works with these most distinctive features, in which the robust and luxuriant life of nature can find full expression in rattans that stretch and climb on old white walls like blood vessels and rivers, reminiscent of the brilliant symphony of life.

　　The plants finding their way to Wu Guanzhong’s paintings, as a rule, are not rare and expensive species. Even grasses, which are generally neglected, win solicitude and care from the sympathetic Wu Guanzhong. In Coloured Faces Under the Sky (1998), he paints ordinary scenes like countless wild flowers and grasses, autumn leaves, lotus ponds and farmhouses to show his philosophy of universal equality and coexistence in nature. He even elicits an impressive and vigorous image from the ordinary A Sheep Pen (1998). Wu Guanzhong refrained from consciously choosing sceneries and structures conventionally regarded as very exquisite as themes for his works in the 1990s. Rather, under the aesthetic philosophy of “true simplicity allows for no artificial carvings”, he composed scenes conventionally dismissed as the most ordinary and not available for paintings, conjuring wonders from the commonplace. Despite that many of his works seem short of structure, many scenes conventionally dismissed as not available for painting are depicted by him with luxuriant vigor and vitality. Rather than fall prey to artistic stereotypes, these works were created in correspondence with the change of the artist’s mood and in this way, Wu Guanzhong expresses a kind of natural and pure beauty immune from artificial embellishment but full of unconventional beauty. Focusing on nature and life with curious eyes like a child, Wu Guazhong found beauty in subjects that are conventionally neglected. Even name plaques like “First Gate Tower in the World” find its way into his paintings and end up becoming the body of the painting, which boasts the same artistic effects as the painting A Jam shop (2000) in the watery country south of the Yangtze River despite the different artistic approaches.

　　vii) Return to Innocence

　　With his growth in age and experience of life, Wu Guanzhong increasingly cherished the memory of his childhood and hometown, which can find expression in many of the works he created from the late 1990s to the initial years of the 21st century to recollect his childhood and hometown. In Southern Bank of Yangtze River (1996), we can smell a kind of strong homesickness. His care for life and close attention to ordinary scenes fostered the aesthetic character of returning to innocence in his arts. He increasingly returns to innocence and rusticity in respect to structure, color, theme and emotion, which adequately shows that Wu Guanzhong’s arts in the 1990s fostered perspicacious insight into the essence of life. Life, full of impurities is rustic and one’s late life if without affectations is like the limpid and clear world under a bright moon. These homesick paintings by Wu Guanzhong elicit various thoughts of life, incorporating as they do both emptiness and lightness, silent and imposing heaviness and even bitterness arising from mundane vicissitude. Where has Spring Gone (1999) expresses the frustrated mood that arises from the failure to return to the hometown in the vigorous spring. In Kites Seen Again(2003), mottled trunks of old trees are highlighted in the forefront of the picture, witnessing mundane vicissitude and colorful kites that are flying freely in the sky behind the old trees like children rollicking under the eyes of serene old people. More amazing is Day and Night (2003) the canvas halved by a big tree in its body, one side of which expresses day while the other depicts night. This surrealist approach incorporating different time and space into one painting further proves Wu Guanzhong’s free mindset towards distinctive artistic styles. He does not hesitate to employ whatever artistic approach and style at hand to give free impression to his mental state.

　　viii) Psychic Scene

　　The works Wu Guanzhong created in his later life downplay the concepts of still life, figure and scenic paintings in the traditional sense, which, from my perspective, are the expression of the boundless spiritual world of this cross-century old artist and hence can be called the “psychic scene”. “Psychic scene”, signaling the human being’s perception of nature from a cosmic perspective, is a significant concept put forward in the theses submitted in the national oil painting seminars held in the 1990s. It is more an artistic conception than an artistic style and can be understood as “A heart caring little about material gains can see farther” initiated by Ou Yangxiu. Zhu Yizhan illustrates this kind of “cosmic sense” featuring remoteness and vastness in time and space through Inquiries to the Heavens Qu Yuan and Poem Composed on Youzhou Platform by Chen Zi’ang. If paintings of objective scenes delight people through their presentation of the beauty of form and color in nature, then paintings of the psychic scene touch the hearts of audience through their presentation of subtle and delicate emotions arising from the depth of people’s hearts in the face of nature, and which are experienced rather than expressed. Here, I would like to cite two paragraphs of monologue about creation by Dongshankuiyi to illustrate the mentality at work in the process of creation of psychic scene paintings.

　　“A nameless creek is flowing in a mountain valley, surrounded by a tranquil world in late autumn. I silently focus my eyes on one corner of uninviting nature, listening to the solemn music intrinsic in it.”

　　“The incessant snowflakes are fluttering in an introspective and tranquil world, further reinforcing its quietness, from which, however, infinite warmness can be felt. It is not a dead world. Rather, it is quiet world full of vigor and vitality.”[3]

　　Psychic scene, a “me-oriented state of mind” created primarily through expressionistic approaches, gives priority to the expression of people’s subjective cognizance of the objective world and the intense internal emotions that result from it. Based on the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, it lays stress on the expression of people’s psychic world and reflects the individual’s aesthetic sentiments and philosophy with respect to the cosmos and nature. From an aesthetic psychological perspective, it is achieved thorough “emotional outpouring”, a radiation and release of passion from the internal world to the external world. In aesthetic terms, it expresses a human being’s spirituality through nature and in philosophical terms, it gives full play to the human being’s subjective initiatives in the relationship between the subjective world and objective world, favoring outward radiation and oozing of emotions in a subjective way. The psychic scene is the eve that forebodes the transition from concrete scenic painting to abstract scenic painting. In the oriental painting system, however, due to Chinese traditional aesthetic views and conventions, mountain-water paintings have so far seldom switched to purely abstract scenic painting. Given that the proposition “Idea precedes form”, rather than meaning that form can be dismissed, refers to the expression of an idea free from the yoke of form. Thus, natural sceneries are artistically handled in a highly generalized way, consisting of transformation, exaggeration, ellipsis and combination. The expressive ability of formal elements for structuring, like dot, line, facet and color, among others, are given much importance and given full play in artistic creation. In psychological terms, psychic scene is the creative artistic abstraction and imagination based on scenes present in past memory, which do not break away from reality but differ substantially from reality. “Transformation into an original state”, disintegration and recombination of formal structures and colors in nature seem to dilute similitude of nature but enrich artistic ingenuity. The artist must “externally learn from nature and internally learn from spirit.” What psychic scene paints, in effect, is nature profoundly “reconstructed” in a subjective way by artists and their inner world closely communicative with nature.

　　Wu Guanzhong’s arts since the 1990s are the blending and refining of his rich life experience and spiritual world. The audience’s attention, as a rule, is focused on the exquisite formal structure and rich color of his paintings. They appreciate the formal beauty of his works from the visual perspective. In the works Wu Guanzhong created since the 1990s, however, formal elements increasingly fade behind the canvas. Rather than express formal beauty consciously in his works, Wu Guanzhong expresses his profound experience of life and nature in a more unaffected way, hence fostering humanity in his paintings based on history. In the works Wu Guanzhong created since the 1990s like Inquiries to the Heavens (1999), Sunset as Red as Blood(2001) , which are set in a heavily black backdrop, life is elicited in a hazy way, reminiscent of the heaviness and dimness typical of a tragedy. These works bear resemblance to those by Lin Fengmian in his later life in that they give expression to the transience of life and eternity of the universe, like the artistic conception pregnant in Cao Cao’s poem Confronting Bellowing Sea. To Wu Guanzhong painting is his life-long pursuit, a channel to bring forth to others the profound and rich experience the artist harbors in his ulterior inner self. A French critic argues: “ Painting must ensure depth: depth of the artist’s own history, painting history, human society, body, knowledge and enjoyment...Painting incredibly condenses and refines many aspects: memory, transience, current pursuits and dreams of the future, among others.”

　　The biggest challenge confronting Wu Guanzhong in his later life lies more in life than in art. His artistic fame since the 1990s has been rising exponentially and the price for his art works in the market have been skyrocketing. To artists weak in will and indulging in vanity, their arts go just as far as this, and they end up becoming producers of paintings in batches. Wu Guanzhong, however, maintains a sober and levelheaded understanding of the art world, dismissing high-priced paintings in the art market as having nothing to do with him. He focuses more on his internal world. Therefore, he worked diligently in his simple studio. It is far from easy for an artist to rid himself of the seduction of the trendy tide of the art market, to acquire an objective and historical evaluation. Duchamp said that: “Danger comes from the pandering to the audience closest to you, who surround you, await you and eventually deify you into incarnation of success and what not.” Art is the expression of both expressive capacity and the personality of the artist. The artist Francis Bacon said that the majority of people come to know art through artistic theory instead of paintings themselves. He said: “No artist can tell in his life whether his art can be of any value because, from my personal perspective, it takes at least 75 to 100 years for the arts to shake off the yoke of the prevalent artistic theory.” Time will eventually prove the significant role Wu Guanzhong plays in the history of Chinese contemporary art. We should, therefore, know and appreciate Wu Guanzhong’s art more from his works than otherwise. What stands out in Wu Guanzhong lies in his upholding of the principle of art as life, and his indifference to fame and monetary gain.

　　The critic Peng De argues that a significant switch is currently under way in the world art scene. People increasingly revolt against arts that express violence and abnormality and make efforts to adjust to them because the world needs elegant, peaceful, healthy, sound and positive art. He further argues that art should keep a certain distance from reality and modern culture but should take their root in modern civilization to foster reflective and modest paintings. The two exorbitant costs incurred by China in its modernization process are the rapid deterioration of the ecology and the degeneration of social morals. Moral degeneration is more destructive than pollution and the scarcity of natural resources, which should be rehabilitated and salved through art.

　　From my perspective, Wu Guanzhong’s art is a tonic and provides nutrients in the history of the human arts that nurtures human hearts. His paintings, an art that can make people calm and observe nature in a peaceful and reflective way, are spiritual vitamins that are most wanting in China’s modernization process. He paints still life, scenery and figures as a form of life, expressing an individual’s respect for nature, love of life and affection for the landscape of his own motherland. In a nutshell, Wu Guanzhong’s oil paintings since the 1990s are more abstract and expressionistic and visually more succinct and innocent. Despite that themes, such as wild grass and trees, or white cloud and kite, are presented in his paintings with an innocent mentality typical of childhood, they are less constrained by the yoke of formal beauty. Rather, they are the expression of his in-depth and profound perception of life and history after the numerous ups and downs of his checkered life. Wu Guanzhong is the son grown and nurtured on the fertile soil of China and his art has become a barometer indicating the mores prevailing in the process of China’s transformation into a modern society. He, together with Lu Xun, his mentor Lin Fengmian and bosom friend Xiong Bingming whom he esteems, represents a generation of intellectuals in China endowed with perseverance, ingenuity, moral integrity and artistic passion. Wu Guanzhong’s legendary life and his numerous works have become valuable spiritual treasures of our nation.

　　Wu Guanzhong’s thoughts and art show respect and advocacy toward science and rationality, they brim with affection for nature, human society and life. Lin Yutang once evaluated Su Dongpo thus: “His life experience is essentially the natural expression of his nature. Life is immortal and beautiful, so he enjoyed his life to the greatest extent.” The odyssey to art is so challenging and arduous to others, but to Wu Guanzhong it is his enjoyment of life. He incorporates and condenses all his thoughts, feelings, meditations, inspirations and perceptions into his paintings, hence they brim with the brilliance of humanity and wisdom. We descendents therefore can be baptized in the beauty of his works, appreciating nature from a new perspective and enjoying the beauty life endows to us.

　　[1] Xu Jiang, Vigil at One Meter, Shanghai Book & Printing Publishing House, 2005 Edition

　　[2] Zhai Mo, Biography of Wu Guanzhong, People’s Literature Publishing House，1997 Edition

　　[3] Kaii Higashiyama, the Green World, Plastic Arts, Vol. 2, 1980