Page 38 - The Pioneers, November 26, 2016 Hong Kong

Lot 2504
In 1936, Wu Guanzhong entered the National Academy
of Art in Hangzhou founded by Lin Fengmian, initially
studying oil painting under Chang Shuhong, and thereafter
learning Chinese traditional painting from Pan Tianshou.
In 1947, after excelling in examination, he was admitted to
government-funded study in France, where he entered the
École nationale des beaux-arts for a three-year course of
study. There, he gained a deep understanding of the essence
of Western modern art, such as Impressionist colours, post-
Impressionist visuality, Fauvist complete unleash of freedom,
Cubist new form of expression. Upon his return to China,
Wu Guanzhong embarked upon an inspirational fusion of
Chinese traditional and Western modern art to create a third
way, by employing ink and paper as its carrier, at the same
time combining with concepts in Western modern art. In
particular, Wu made breakthrough innovation to concepts
and techniques and renewed visual language in terms of
composition and structure, brushstroke and coloration. In
this way, he inherited from and further developed Chinese
ink painting, and thereby inaugurated a new era.
Under the political circumstances prevailing in China during
the Cultural Revolution, Wu Guanzhong ended up being 'sent
down' to the countryside several times for 'reform through
labour.' That, however, did not dampen his fervent pursuit
of painting, but served instead to focus his attention even
more strongly on landscape-themed works. During the hours
he spent at farm labour, he came to the realization that any
interpretation of beauty must be sought in nature, and further, to live. Song Dynasty painter Guo Xi once spoke of paintings
that one's own thoughts and feelings must become part of
the scenes depicted — a realization that helped produce
many successful works. The Lu Mountains (Lot 2504), dating
from 1974, is Wu Guanzhong's most representative work
from the 1970s, when his work in the oil medium was at its
peak. In it Wu finds a precise balance between realism and
a more freestyle (or xieyi) approach. The work is filled with
freestyle brushwork of great abstract beauty, along with bold,
solid lines that find a complement in others less distinct.
Combined with these is the natural flavour of Wu's simple,
32 THE PIONEERS 先 鋒 薈 萃
earthy colours, while the structural
relationships between his colours and
lines produces the finely managed sense
of space and depth in The Lu Mountains.
In The Lu Mountains, Wu Guanzhong
boldly chooses to make trees and
branches a dominating presence in
the foreground of the work. These he
sets out in strong, distinctive, and vivid
brushwork, using horizontal strokes to
create texture in the tree trunks, while
the fine lines of slimmer branches
are etched out of the pigment on
the canvas. Wu's composition allows
viewers to imaginatively enter into the
scene, touching their feelings with the
sense of glimpsing beautiful scenes
in the distance through the branches.
This double presentation of close-up
branches with more distant vistas
adds a wealth of poetic energy to this
otherwise realistic scenic presentation.
A shift in our viewpoint occurs as our
eyes moves from the close foreground
toward the white buildings and red-tile
roofs in the valley, and then further on to the grand rise of the
mountain peak in the distance. The artist guides us as we
roam through the landscape: here there are mountain paths
to walk, distant peaks at which to gaze, and homes in which
in which 'there are landscapes with places to walk, vistas to
gaze at, paths to roam, and houses in which to live,' and Wu
Guanzhong here offers a fresh new interpretation of that view.
The pictorial space of The Lu Mountains is dominated by
Wu's strong, expressive lines, somewhere between freestyle
abstraction and naturalistic realism, which call to mind
the decorative screens produced by Japanese artist Ogata
Korin (Fig. 1) or the highly stylized landscape paintings of
Gustav Klimt (Fig. 2). Korin eliminated any background in
order to highlight his shapes and forms and the appeal of
his subject; Klimt, on the other hand, provides a profusion
of detail with multitudes of repeated points and lines. Wu
Guanzhong's expressive approach is more elegant in its easy,
effortless, yet reserved manner, and in this painting, which is
lucid and understandable yet invested with deep feeling, he
finds magnificent beauty in the ordinary. His brushwork is
free and varied but never dense or complicated in the least,
and his accurate depiction of the relative sizes, heights, and
distances of objects allows the painting to exude a sense
of precisely ordered beauty. The expression of rich detail
without losing sight of the overarching order bespeaks a
certain kind of aesthetic and a mature technique, closely
linked to the aesthetic traditions behind Chinese landscape
paintings and the grand sweep of their conceptions.
Beyond its finely managed composition, The Lu Mountains
also features rich colour and meticulous layering. In the
trees and mountains, Wu employs alternating areas of cool
and warm tones in pigments which have the same kind
of bright, saturated colours and earthy textures seen in
natural minerals. From the broad perspective of art history,
the jumbled blocks of colours in The Lu Mountains could
perhaps be seen as inspired by Cezanne, though Wu moves