Pine Spirit, Wu Guanzhong

Exhibition Label: “An Elegant Gathering: Selections from the Collection Honoring Dr. and Mrs. Li,” Feb-2009, Kris Ercums After studying under Lin Fengmian 林風眠 (1900-1991) and Pan Tianshou 潘天寿 (1897-1971), Wu was awarded a government scholarship in 1946 to continue his art education at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1950 he returned to teach at the newly established Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, which was dominated by socialist realism. As a self-styled “fortress of bourgeois formalism” he was severely criticized and because of his refusal to conform to political dogma he was eventually banned from painting in 1966. More than a decade later, when he finally began to paint again, Wu developed a new style that forged Western and Chinese media and formal principles. In Pine Spirit, dots explode across the surface amid dancing lines and bold brushstrokes with only minimal concern for the naturalistic shapes of mountains and pines. Exhibition Label: “Transformations,” Feb-2006, Mary Dusenbury and Alison Miller In this painting, Wu Guanzhong is looking both to the ancient Chinese tradition of shan-shui-hua and to abstract expressionism, transforming both into a highly individual and compelling vision of “mountains and rivers.” Archive Label 2003 (version 2): Wu Guanzhong was trained at the National Hangzhou Academy of Art in Western painting. He studied with the head of the Academy, Lin Fengmian, an artist deeply influenced by Post-Expressionism and Fauvism. In 1946, Wu received a scholarship to study in Paris where he gained a deeper understanding and appreciation of contemporary French painting. In 1950 Wu made the difficult decision to return to China hoping to contribute what he had learned to the new nation. Although he was given a professorship at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing, his formal approach was out of favor in a milieu of social-realism. In 1967, as the full force of the Cultural Revolution swept the country, Wu was sent to a labor farm and forbidden to paint. After ten years of hardship, Wu began to work intensely again in the comparative freedom that followed the end of the Cultural Revolution. Using both Western and Chinese media, he developed a radically new style based on his interpretation of the diverse formal principles of beauty found in contemporary European painting, traditional Chinese art, and the world of nature. In his Chinese-style (guohua) painitngs, Wu paints dots and lines in both ink and watercolor to build up semi-abstract forms. While the spectrum of colors and the practice of dripping ink and clolors onto the paper have no precedent in traditional Chinese painting, Wu uses the flexible Chinese brush to create lines of diverse widths and textures that are impossible with a Western brush. In Pine Spirit, dots explode across the surface amid dancing lines and bold brushstrokes with only minimal concern for the naturalistic shapes of mountains and pines. Archive Label 2003 (version 1): Wu Guanzhong studied Western painting at the National Hangzhou Academy of Art in Beijing under Lin Fengmian, an artist deeply influenced by Post-Expressionism and Fauvism, before moving to France in 1946. In 1950 Wu returned to China as a professor at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing, hoping to contribute what he had learned to the new nation. He found, however, that his formal approach was out of favor in a milieu of social-realism and in 1967, as the Cultural Revolution swept the country, Wu was sent to a labor farm and forbidden to paint. A decade later, when he finally began to paint again, Wu developed a radically new style that forged western and Chinese media and formal principles of beauty. In Pine Spirit, Wu paints dots and lines in both ink and watercolor to build up semi-abstract forms. Dots explode across the surface amid dancing lines and bold brushstrokes with only minimal concern for the naturalistic shapes of mountains and pines.