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Lot Essay
Wu Guanzhong long admired the majestic two-thousand-year-old pine tree on the Tai Mountains known as the Fifth-Rank Pine. When Wu first climbed the Tai Mountains in the 1980s, the artist sketched the pine tree from multiple angles to capture its regal spirit. The authoritative monograph The Complete Works by Wu Guanzhong published three versions of Pine Soul all of which Wu painted in 1984. The present lot is one of these three works, with another version sold in Christie’s Hong Kong in 2015.
In his essay entitled An Unbroken Line of the Kite, Wu Guanzhong recounts his experience of a moment of epiphany when he felt his art began to connect with the spirit of the magnificent pine tree. That moment strikes him as if ‘‘suddenly I felt it charging towards me, overwhelming me…like Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, the indomitable warrior of the natural world… I tried to capture the soul of the pine, to represent its struggles and jaggedness with wild ink lines, with lines in continuous motion freeing its noble soul… the tranquil straight lines in grey stand in contrast to the surging lines in ink, and they collide and occlude and shatter in their explosive colour sparks all over the mountains. Are these sparks not merely remnants of nature’s once chaotic times?”
Pine Soul series witnesses a turning point in Wu Guanzhong’s creative oeuvre. It marks the evolution of his artistic style from figurative to abstraction. In the present lot, the wilting trees in an ancient forest transform into sequences of exhilarating and energetic dots and lines, flowing effortlessly on the composition. Wu’s manifestation reminds viewers of the abstract expressionist paintings by Jackson Pollock whilst relating his art seamlessly to the thousand-year-old Chinese ink tradition and the spirit resonance it encompasses. His performance, which combines abstraction and his passion for life and nature, gives birth to his most iconic theme in the 1980s.
In his essay entitled An Unbroken Line of the Kite, Wu Guanzhong recounts his experience of a moment of epiphany when he felt his art began to connect with the spirit of the magnificent pine tree. That moment strikes him as if ‘‘suddenly I felt it charging towards me, overwhelming me…like Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, the indomitable warrior of the natural world… I tried to capture the soul of the pine, to represent its struggles and jaggedness with wild ink lines, with lines in continuous motion freeing its noble soul… the tranquil straight lines in grey stand in contrast to the surging lines in ink, and they collide and occlude and shatter in their explosive colour sparks all over the mountains. Are these sparks not merely remnants of nature’s once chaotic times?”
Pine Soul series witnesses a turning point in Wu Guanzhong’s creative oeuvre. It marks the evolution of his artistic style from figurative to abstraction. In the present lot, the wilting trees in an ancient forest transform into sequences of exhilarating and energetic dots and lines, flowing effortlessly on the composition. Wu’s manifestation reminds viewers of the abstract expressionist paintings by Jackson Pollock whilst relating his art seamlessly to the thousand-year-old Chinese ink tradition and the spirit resonance it encompasses. His performance, which combines abstraction and his passion for life and nature, gives birth to his most iconic theme in the 1980s.