Wu Guanzhong (吳冠中)

「獨木桥头一背影，過桥遠去，不知走向何方，60 年歲月流逝，他又回到了獨木桥，老了，傷了，走上桥，面向眾生。』

(A silhouette upon a one-log bridge crossed it, vanishing into the distance, not knowing whither. 60 years flowed by and vanished. He's again upon the one-log bridge, older, hurt. He moved up the bridge, facing common folks.) (my translation).

This was written by the artist Wu Guanzhong (吳冠中) (1919-2010) in 2010, shortly before he died.

What is that bridge along which he trudged along through all these years, all alone? Could it be the bridge between the East and the West, between reality and illusion, between form and spirit and ultimately between life and death. He was certainly wounded in spirit by the Cultural Revolution whose memory still haunted him from time to time. 

Prompted by the blog article of a fellow blogger, I attended an exhibition of the works he donated to the Hong Kong Museum of Art yesterday. I remember I first saw his works in one of those huge books of reproduction which was the way Chinese publishers made them at the time, when I visited the capital back in 1980 and immediately fell in love with the way he painted. Since then, he has moved from strength to strength and never ceased to evolve. This is what I admire most in him. A man must never cease to move forward, no matter how established one has become or thinks one has. He must constantly surpass his own past. He must leave it behind. He must forge ahead, towards terra incognita, towards the unknown. That to me, is the best way to live. That may also be the best way to paint. Wu did it. Perhaps that was the reason he became the first living Chinese painter whose works were exhibited at the British Museum. That was in 1992! I like the way that as he grew older, his lines became simpler and he moved further and further away from the idea of art as representation.

According to internet sources, Wu was born in born in Yixing (宜興), Jiangsu Province, in 1919, began life as an engineering student at Zhejiang
Industrial School (浙江公立工業專門學校), a technical school of Zhejiang
University in Hangzhou in 1935 but transferred to the National Arts
Academy of Hangzhou the following year, studying both Chinese and Western painting under Pan Tianshou (潘天壽)(1897-1971) and Lin Fengmian (林風眠) (1900-1991) and went to the École Nationale
Supérieure des Beaux Arts in 1947 on a government scholarship, greatly admired the works of Utrillo, Braque, Matisse, Gauguin, Cézanne and
Picasso, especially those of Van Gogh whose grave he visited.

Wu has truly merged the holistic spirit of Chinese painting into the analytic Western ways of painting. In doing so, he has produced art which is always full of the spirit of life: one of constant bold exploration and innovative trials with little regard of what mainstream society may think good, worthwhile, valuable or ideologically correct. His paintings thus have a uniqueness which is entirely his own. That is something which no painter can ever imitate. Painting is not just a question of technique, although no doubt that is important . But once one has mastered it, an artist must move on to paint what inspires him, what moves him from that burning need to express what he sees, not only with his eyes, but with his heart or both his minds ' and his heart's eyes. Otherwise, his paintings may end up not as art, but something mechanical, mere artifacts, which any good craftsman can produce. It will then lack what is most important in a work of art: its life, its vividness, its vitality, its joy, its sorrows  and its reflection not just of but upon life or at least the artist's transient impressions and sentiments of life which may become lost forever to humanity unless he were  to somehow leave behind something of them in a rather more "permanent" form.

This is his『瀑布』 (Waterfall or Cascade) 1986. Note how simple the lines are: just the barest minimum to suggest the breadth of the waterfall and a few trees to break the monotony of the picture frame. This painting is one done at Jiuzhaigou (九寨溝). He says, "我抹盡雜樹亂石，還她一個清白之軀，素白的奔瀉，似一面明鏡，讓世人照見自身的污濁." (I did my best to avoid the chaotic trees and the disorderly rocks and gave her back her pristine body, a torrent of pure white, like a mirror, so that the people of the world may see their own dirt."


In the 1990s he did a series of really beautiful paintings on Indonesia, including one on the Safari Park, one on Indonesian boats, some others on harvests and trees and some reminiscences of his childhood world and he continued to paint until he died. He even did a painting on the Olympic "Nest" in Beijing!.

This is his " 雪山" (Snowy mountain). 1997. Note how simple it has become. Huge patches of white interspersed with just a couple of lightly painted ink spots contrasting with the heavy but simple lines and patches at the bottom. Spirit (神) has completely overridden mere "form" (形): something extremely Chinese.

This is what I like about Wu's paintings. This one is his "patch-work clothe". In his painting, you find all kinds of bright colors: yellow, green, pink and red but also blacks, greys and some softer colors. If the strong colors and softer colors are there, they are there always to highlight the stronger primary colors which he favors: yellow, green, pink and red. You can feel his vitality coursing through his brush strokes. He simply loves life.

This is one of his paintings about roots. He loves to paint tree roots and creepers because their lines are seldom straight. He never paints what he sees with his physical eyes, only what his physical eyes suggest to his mind or to his heart. This is one of his later paintings which one can compare with his earlier one on the same subject, "東風開過紫藤花" (The East Wind Over Wisteria") done in 2009. He loves to paint dots and spots amidst the wavy lines that he loves and his dots are often in yellow, green, pink and red, perhaps to suggest the little explosions of joy that he finds in his heart when he finds what he likes. 

This is one of his other paintings entitled "Tree Roots" done in the 1980s. Again, you find wavy lines, just like, in a way, Van Gogh but his waves are more irregular and less strong than those of Van Gogh, whom he loves. Again we find that he has added some colorful dots along the trunk of the trees and painted in a few stumps of grass growing at the side of some of the roots. He says. "根如蟹爪抓大地，縱橫交錯堅而固，粗細擴展如國畫，護住軀幹高幾許". ( Roots grab the land like the claws of the crab. They criss-cross each other and are strong and firm. They extend like Chinese paintings through thick and thin, to protect the tree trunks so they may reach higher." This may perhaps explain his fondness for painting roots. They are the foundations not only of plant life, but perhaps metaphorically, that of his own. They are the roots of his own art: his "Chinese-ness"!

This is his 海風 ( Sea Winds) 1997. It is a painting of the branches of the trees facing the sea. He says. 『大風起兮樹飛揚，濱海之林皆斜傾，海風列烈，從樹苗到老邁，終身猛腰未直，屈辱生涯，遙望美國舊金山.』 (The wind rises. The trees flutter. Trees facing the ocean are all bent. The sea winds are strong. From saplings to old age, they have never stood up straight all their lives. A life of humiliation. Looking towards San Francisco, USA in the distance.". What is that sea? Is that the sea of politics? And what are those trees? The trees of art in China? (Note: the squarish thing in the centre of the photograph is an artifact of the reflection upon the glass case housing the painting and not part of the painting).

This
one is entitled "拋了年華"  (The Years of Bloom Thrown Away), 2009. They
look like faded lotus upon broken stems and capture most economically
the disorder and chaos that old age may bring into the artist's life as
life takes its natural course. Yet in between the lines, we again find
the little spots in darker and lighter hues. These may be the little
specks of his sentiments as he contemplates each of the broken stalks.
He says: ≡樹老根出，荷老枝折，寧折毋屈，不惜年華』 (Roots come out when a tree gets old. A
lotus breaks when it gets old. It'd rather break than bend. It regrets
not at all the passing of the years ). That is his spirit! Is he referring there to the fact of how at the start of the Cultural Revolution in
1966, he was banned from painting, writing and teaching, and how in 1970, he was
sent to Hebei Province for hard labor and yet continued to paint in secret?

This one is called 『糧倉 』(Granary) 2009 and shows a mountain of golden grains upon yellow stalks which the peasants carefully cut and carry grain by grain that he saw upon the ground during harvest seasons . The lines are bold and the mountains huge. The dots around the huge piles are presumably the peasants who have become dwarfed (in the artist's subjective impressions) by comparison by with what they have produced.  

This one is called 『夢醒』(Awakening) done also in 2010. Again, you find the painting has curved lines and loops freely interweaving other patches of colors of thicker and lighter hues as in traditional Chinese ink painting but the use of color is purely abstract and suggestive and always light, perhaps to simulate the hazy and fuzzy feelings and the lingering impressions one gets when one has just woken up from a dream or a sleep.  Here one no longer finds thick brush lines with solid dark hues. Everything has become much lighter: the lines are less thick. So are the colors and there are much fewer lines. Everything has become briefer, simpler and more laconic. This painting is supposed to about a lotus pond with some green leaves. But the leaves have become blurred into mere green patches, without leaf boundaries and they have merged into the dreamlike environment.

Compare the above with this painting from an earlier period on a lotus pond, the Red Lotus (1997), obtained from another internet source and the simplification in lines and color will become immediately obvious: in the earlier work, the use of lines is still quite "western" (straight) and you can still find the leaves and the flowers, which although already a bit abstract, are still separate and has clear boundaries. They have become completely fluid in the later painting: all lines and curves and the shading of the colors are done Chinese style through the saturation of the ink at the tip of the same brush stroke and hence much more integrated. Even the lines are no longer separate but are joined in the free flow of the dance-like movement of his emotions .




This one is called "巢" (Nest) done 2010 immediately after the Chinese New Year and his very last piece of work.  In this painting, he has retained the use of lines and dots. Instead of painting "unconnected" curve lines, he how links them together to form an organic structure. He says that he was inspired by the Olympic "Nest" in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He may wish to join all the different strands of his past together into a holistic structure. Hence we find numerous circles which goes round and round like life itself which interweaves into each other and which appear to go beyond the boundaries of the paper upon which it is painted. In between the lines, we find bigger and smaller dots, a trace of his past. Through the apparent "mess", we find "the rhythms" of life in the way the lines come together and leave each other. 

Apart from the above, there are other paintings too numerous to reproduce here even by photographs. However, it may be of interest to note that he has been in Hong Kong and left some tangible records of his presence here. He went to Tak Wan Teahouse, an old style Chinese teahouse in Western District, whither bird lovers would take their favourite song birds to compete with those of other customers.

This is a snapshot from the RTHK movie about Wu.

Another snapshot from that movie.

A snapshot of the his sketch of Tak Wan Tea House in Western District, Hong Kong.

His sketch of the Victoria Harbour.

It may well be a worthwhile experience to go see his exhibition to feel the power of his paintings in person at the HK Museum of Art.