.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Wu Guanzhong was born amid the rich culture and customs of Jiangsu, which, along with the beauty and charm of its Jiangnan scenery, exerted an imperceptible influence on his humanistic outlook. At 17, Wu decided to give up electrical engineering, passed the entrance exam for the Hangzhou Academy of Arts, and set out on the path of art, spending the rest of his life pursuing the essence of Chinese painting and Western aesthetics. He once said, “The taste that informs the painting styles of modern art is already implicit in many of China's early masterpieces. I believe our Bada Shanren, with his ability to bring the figurative and the abstract together, was the traditional painter who explored the most deeply the realm of abstract beauty. I introduce aspects of coloured-ink painting into my oil paintings, trying to give them those lyrical washes of colour in the Chinese style. I've also absorbed a special feature of composition from ancient Chinese paintings, in the way they combine several different scenes into one grand vista. I combine the best features of ancient paintings and oil paintings, to produce the kind of images and colours, and the grand sense of space, that will move a viewer.”
All Eastern painting makes use of the special aura of ink, creating scenes of mountain forests whose special ambience in turn conveys the mysteries of nature. Western modernism, by contrast, often employs geometrical structures to express the concept of space, and ingeniously transforms colour into physical substance. East and West have followed different routes toward realizing their conceptions. But if common underlying assumptions can be discovered, it becomes possible to create pathways between them and produce art with a powerful world view and an unconventional sense of beauty. In his art, Wu Guanzhong did just that, and his convincing solutions to these issues inform the greatness of his work.
A Village of Xishuangbanna (Lot 7) painted in 1994, by which time Wu Guanzhong had attained mature proficiency in his presentation of images, the forms of his compositions, and the use of colour. It seems that for Wu, as for Buddhists on the way to enlightenment, mountains are no longer just mountains; the angled edges of the rows of thatched rooftops in the distance are shaped in simple strokes with the edge of Wu's brush, with little added detail and unclear boundaries between them. This approach recalls Cézanne, who believed in the concept that 'lines don't exist in nature; light and shadow don't exist; only contrasts between colours exist. Modeling is just the outcome of exact relationships between tones.' For that reason, Cézanne abandoned precise shaping of objects, and gave his attention only to their sense of volume and the overall relationship between them; sometimes, to produce harmonious relationships between all of them, he even abandoned the attempt to depict them as fully independent and real individual forms (fig. 1). Here, in Wu's Village, the ducks at the riverside thus are little more than specks, while Wu outlines the grasses and trees of the middle ground with brushwork similar to ink-wash styles, such as those seen in the hills and valleys of paintings by Bada Shanren (fig. 2). Wu also organizes his foreground, middle ground, and distance in a layered arrangement similar to the Song Dynasty's Fan Kuan in Travelers Among Mountains and Streams (fig. 3). At the same time, Wu has also grasped the techniques of Western modernism in using colour to represent object surfaces, as in the work of Piet Mondrian, a member of the De Stijl group (fig. 4), who converted all images he saw into horizontal and vertical lines. Only the addition of colour, however, could bring about their transformation into surfaces, and his colours also produced the sense of emerging or receding forms in space, while emphasizing the interaction between the spaces in the painting and their balance. Over the years, Wu Guanzhong made great efforts at extracting the best elements of both Eastern and Western painting, and here, as in Mondrian, his spots of red, blue, yellow, and green add to the sense of spatial depth, and his choice of colours and their placement help achieve the harmonious balance and beauty of the painting. Also interesting is how Wu uses the sharp end of his brush handle to scrape out lines, in contrast to his use of white in the ducks at the riverside; the scraped lines highlight the fence and tree branches and add a level of fine detail that brings a sense of completion to the painting. In this, his technique also connects with Chinese painting, where there is no white ink, except in the subtractive sense where other colours are absent, so that the areas left white express the brightness of objects.
Wu Guanzhong's artistic journey spanned over half a century, and he sought to understand the true nature of art, continually refining his abilities as he switched between the ink and oil mediums. In his work he combined his unique personal views and interpretations regarding modern Western oil painting and traditional Eastern ink works. But his Eastern abstract paintings were genuine Chinese paintings, in which he received and carried on the Chinese painting tradition and the aesthetics it represented. Whether in towering mountain ranges, gushing springs with clouds of mist, sturdy pines, or quaint riverside villages, his works all displayed the ability to master complexity with a simplicity of style and brushwork. Further, his ability to adapt elements of Chinese coloured ink painting for use in the oil medium helped usher in a new future for Chinese painting. Because of all these outstanding abilities, he remains today a figure of unmatched accomplishment in the world of international art.
All Eastern painting makes use of the special aura of ink, creating scenes of mountain forests whose special ambience in turn conveys the mysteries of nature. Western modernism, by contrast, often employs geometrical structures to express the concept of space, and ingeniously transforms colour into physical substance. East and West have followed different routes toward realizing their conceptions. But if common underlying assumptions can be discovered, it becomes possible to create pathways between them and produce art with a powerful world view and an unconventional sense of beauty. In his art, Wu Guanzhong did just that, and his convincing solutions to these issues inform the greatness of his work.
A Village of Xishuangbanna (Lot 7) painted in 1994, by which time Wu Guanzhong had attained mature proficiency in his presentation of images, the forms of his compositions, and the use of colour. It seems that for Wu, as for Buddhists on the way to enlightenment, mountains are no longer just mountains; the angled edges of the rows of thatched rooftops in the distance are shaped in simple strokes with the edge of Wu's brush, with little added detail and unclear boundaries between them. This approach recalls Cézanne, who believed in the concept that 'lines don't exist in nature; light and shadow don't exist; only contrasts between colours exist. Modeling is just the outcome of exact relationships between tones.' For that reason, Cézanne abandoned precise shaping of objects, and gave his attention only to their sense of volume and the overall relationship between them; sometimes, to produce harmonious relationships between all of them, he even abandoned the attempt to depict them as fully independent and real individual forms (fig. 1). Here, in Wu's Village, the ducks at the riverside thus are little more than specks, while Wu outlines the grasses and trees of the middle ground with brushwork similar to ink-wash styles, such as those seen in the hills and valleys of paintings by Bada Shanren (fig. 2). Wu also organizes his foreground, middle ground, and distance in a layered arrangement similar to the Song Dynasty's Fan Kuan in Travelers Among Mountains and Streams (fig. 3). At the same time, Wu has also grasped the techniques of Western modernism in using colour to represent object surfaces, as in the work of Piet Mondrian, a member of the De Stijl group (fig. 4), who converted all images he saw into horizontal and vertical lines. Only the addition of colour, however, could bring about their transformation into surfaces, and his colours also produced the sense of emerging or receding forms in space, while emphasizing the interaction between the spaces in the painting and their balance. Over the years, Wu Guanzhong made great efforts at extracting the best elements of both Eastern and Western painting, and here, as in Mondrian, his spots of red, blue, yellow, and green add to the sense of spatial depth, and his choice of colours and their placement help achieve the harmonious balance and beauty of the painting. Also interesting is how Wu uses the sharp end of his brush handle to scrape out lines, in contrast to his use of white in the ducks at the riverside; the scraped lines highlight the fence and tree branches and add a level of fine detail that brings a sense of completion to the painting. In this, his technique also connects with Chinese painting, where there is no white ink, except in the subtractive sense where other colours are absent, so that the areas left white express the brightness of objects.
Wu Guanzhong's artistic journey spanned over half a century, and he sought to understand the true nature of art, continually refining his abilities as he switched between the ink and oil mediums. In his work he combined his unique personal views and interpretations regarding modern Western oil painting and traditional Eastern ink works. But his Eastern abstract paintings were genuine Chinese paintings, in which he received and carried on the Chinese painting tradition and the aesthetics it represented. Whether in towering mountain ranges, gushing springs with clouds of mist, sturdy pines, or quaint riverside villages, his works all displayed the ability to master complexity with a simplicity of style and brushwork. Further, his ability to adapt elements of Chinese coloured ink painting for use in the oil medium helped usher in a new future for Chinese painting. Because of all these outstanding abilities, he remains today a figure of unmatched accomplishment in the world of international art.