Background

Guanzhong was born in Yixing, Jiangsu, China, on August 29, 1919.

Education

Wu Guanzhong entered the Zhejiang Industrial School in 1935, where he studied engineering. In 1936 he transferred to the National Academy of Art (now the China Academy of Art) in Hangzhou. There he studied both Chinese and Western painting under the guidance of Pan Tianshou and Lin Fengmian. He graduated in 1942 from the Academy and between 1947 to 1950 he studied at the École Nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was influenced by such European painters as Vincent van Gogh, Amedeo Modigliani and Maurice Utrillo.

Career

Between 1950 and 1953, Guanzhong served as a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, where he taught Western art practices. While teaching, many colleagues criticized him because of jealousy over his job and because he was the only painter practicing formalism. Encountering warm resistance from members of the academy, who were proponents of the Social Realist style, Wu began to work first at Tsinghua University (1953-1964) and then at the Beijing Fine Arts Normal College (now part of Capital Normal University). During this time, he traveled much around the country, and created several landscape paintings.

When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Wu Guanzhong was banned from painting, writing, and even teaching. He recalled, "Life was only planting rice, carrying coal, criticizing one another, and fighting one another... The only thing that no one was allowed to do was paint." Many of his early works were destroyed during this time. A little bit later, he was allowed to paint on Sundays (his day off from the fieldwork) or on holidays. In 1970 he was sent to Hebei Province for hard labor. However, in the year 1973 Guanzhong was one of the leading artists brought back from the countryside to Beijing to paint murals for restaurants and hotels. In order to prepare for a large wall painting at the Beijing Hotel, Guanzhong and several other artists traveled along the Yangtze River to sketch ideas and seek inspiration. Despite the fact that the project was finally abandoned because of another political movement, Wu Guanzhong successfully completed the draft scroll The Yangtze River in 1974.

Guanzhong's style gradually developed over the 1970s, as the artist started to use watercolors in the traditional Chinese style. He then concentrated on the human form, and applied the techniques he used in these works to his landscape paintings, experimenting with ink and oil on paper. After a long break, Wu Guanzhong had an exhibition of his works in 1978 at the Central Academy.

After the Cultural Revolution, Wu Guanzhong was able to successfully bridge the gap between Western and Eastern art, returning to the stylistic formalism for which he had initially become known. At the beginning of the 1980s, he painted The Great Wall for Beijing’s Xiangshan Hotel, which exemplified the shift in style, from representation to semi-abstraction. In his later period the artist's landscapes became more and more abstracted. Most of these works are from after 1990 and show an intention to represent states of being, emotions, and concepts over more realistic representation.

Over the course of his artistic career, Guanzhong had numerous solo exhibitions in major art galleries and museums around the world, including such countries as China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, South Korea, England, the United States. In 1992, his paintings were exhibited at the British Museum. It was the first show for a living Chinese artist at the institution.

Achievements

• Wu Guanzhong was one of the most important artists of the twentieth-century China who is widely considered to be the founder of modern Chinese painting. The artist created works that embodied many of the major shifts and tensions in twentieth-century Chinese art - raising questions about individualism, formalism, and the relationship between modernism and cultural traditions. Being an outstanding ink painter, he pushed the boundaries of our understanding of how a traditional medium of ink can be used in a new century.
  
  In 2008, Guanzhong donated 113 works to the Singapore Art Museum (SAM). This donation was his largest donation to a public museum. Nowadays, his works can be found in public and private collections around the globe.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • 武夷山径

  • Dress Up

  • Torch

  • Home of Man

  • Houses of the South

  • Zhoushan Harbour

  • Parrot Haven

  • Aquatic Bliss

  • Fragrant red Leaves

  • Fruit Tree

  • The Blooming Mountain

  • Love in Fangzhuang

  • Mountains High and Streams Eternal

  • Scenery of Guilin

  • Lotus under the sun

  • The Hometown of Shakespeare

  • Lion Woods

  • unknown title

  • Confucian Forest

  • 老墙

  • Spring Breeze

  • The Hua Mountains at Sunset

  • Kites Seen Again

  • Flower

  • A Banana Graden Of Xishuangbanna

  • A Fishing Harbour

  • A Night Feast Over a Thousand Years

  • Attachment

  • Chongqing of the Old Times

  • A Big Manor

  • unknown title

  • Hong Kong

  • Spring Breeze

  • Ancient Tree by the River

  • White Poplar Woods

  • The Charm of Lotus Pond

  • Blossom Out

  • A Dream of Shen Garden

  • Viewing Fish at Flower Harbour

  • Toyko at Night

  • Alienation

  • unknown title

  • 北武当山

  • Fishes

  • The Great Wall (I)

  • Pines

  • Garden

Views

Quotations: "The beauty of abstract form is extracted from concrete objects and distilled according to the intrinsic qualities of the form. The art of root carving retains certain concrete aspects, and it is considered very beautiful. This is called transforming the common and useless into the marvelous and the quality of abstract beauty is foremost in creating this effect. On the other hand, we also see some artworks that transform the marvelous into something common and useless."

"The relationship between semblance and non-semblance is in fact the same as the relationship between concrete and abstract. What exactly constitutes spirit resonance and lifelike motion (qiyun shengdong) in Chinese traditional painting? Whether in landscape or in flower-and-bird painting, it lies in the expressive difference between motion that has spirit resonance and motion that does not. Within this there is the question of the harmony or conflict between the abstract and the concrete, and the factor of either beauty or ugliness that hovers just beyond. The principle of analysis for form is the same as for music."

"Whenever I am at an impasse, I turn to natural scenery. In nature I can reveal my true feelings to the mountains and rivers: my depth of feelings toward the motherland and my love toward my people. I set off from my own native village and Lu Xun’s native soil."

"Art is like a kite. You have to pull the string hard in order to stretch it to its limit, but you don't want to pull it so hard that you break the thread, because the thread connects you to the land and its peoples."

"Brush and ink are only servants of thoughts and emotion. They should follow your emotion and change with the emotion."

"The fundamental elements of formal beauty comprise form, color, and rhythm. I used eastern rhythms in the absorption of western form and color, like a snake swallowing an elephant. Sometimes I felt I couldn’t gulp it all down and I switched to using [Chinese] ink. This is why in the mid-1970s I began creating a large number of ink paintings. As of today in my explorations I still shift between oil and ink. Oil paint and ink are two blades of the same pair of scissors used to cut the pattern for a whole new suit. To nationalize oil painting and to modernize Chinese painting: in my view these are two sides of the same face."

"I want to express the transformations in space and time that occur in my mind. The many forms I see with my eyes inspire the unpredictable transformations that I haven’t yet seen."

Connections

Wu Guanzhong was married.

References

• Wu Guanzhong, 吴冠中: Beauty Beyond Form, 大美无垠
• Wu Guanzhong: A Twentieth-Century Chinese Painter
• Modern Chinese Artists: A Biographical Dictionary
• The Art of Modern China
• Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-76 (Contemporary Chinese Studies)