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  photo from xinhuanet

Ancient City of Jiaohe

Wu Guanzhong (吴冠中，1919-2010)，one of the most accomplished and outspoken Chinese painters, died at the age of 90 in Beijing on June 25.

Wu received artistic education in the Hangzhou National Arts Academy under guidance of such famous painters like Pan Tianshou (潘天寿, 1897–1971) and innovative and impressionistic artist and educator Lin Fengmian (林风眠, 1900–1991) in the early 20th century. In 1947, Wu went to Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts of France together with some other Chinese painters like Xiong Bingming (熊秉明), Zhu Dequn (朱德群) and Zhao Wuji (赵无极).  He also became the only one who decided to go back to an uncertain China to become “a plum blossom in the winter of one’s hometown instead of a rose in an already prosperous garden of others”.

Since 1950, Wu taught arts successively in the Central Academy of Art, Tsinghua University and the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts. In the meantime, Wu’s painting style, which is a refined combination of  western “bourgeoise” artistic experience with traditional Chinese brush painting,  made him a target for mainstream criticism which believed that art must serve “the masses” with undiscounted social realism of that time. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) when all the “labor-ignorant” intellectuals were dispatched to work in the fields, Wu continued to paint at every minute he could grasp with simple utensils stacked in ox-den baskets, which gave him the nickname of “ox-den basket painter” by the countrymen.

“Sometimes I’d spent hours gazing at a vegetable field from different angles to decide on my composition, and the folks would ask if I lost my watch or something… but still, when I showed my paintings to the country folks who offered me boarding, they could judge it sometimes as ’real’ (for the works I feel not so good about) or ‘beautiful’ (for those I’m really proud of), obviously they know the difference very well. ” recalled Wu in one of his interviews before.

Wu spent 15 years in the countryside, and one place he painted a lot is in Anhui Province, where many art students and tourists frequent today.
And in 1980s, Wu’s paintings and theories suddenly rose to fame along with the comeback of a large number of surviving intellectuals in the mainstream Chinese society, which was featured by fervent trends of “learning from the West” in both scientific and literary fields. 

In the 1990s and afterwards, with more and more Chinese collectors getting rich and international collectors throwing dices over the Chinese art scene, Wu Guanzhong, who was among the few artists who were well-trained in both Chinese and western paintings, and one would even take the labor to crack on fake paintings in person, soon found his paintings rocketing to phenominal value (40.70 million RMB for his painting “Ancient City of Jiaohe” in 2007 ).

Apart from being exhibited in the British Museum (a rare tribute to living Asian artists), Metropolitan Museum, China National Art Museum and other major galleries, Wu also was made Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 1991 and became the first Chinese artist to be awarded the Médaille des Arts et Lettres by the Académie des Beaux-Arts de l’Institut de France in 2002.       

Unimpressed by the global trend of commercialization in arts, Wu donated most of his works to Singapore Art Museum and Hong Kong Art Museum.  

Wu is also famous for his outspoken criticism of the contemporary artistic scene of China, with such quotes as: “100 Qi Baishi the painter cannot substitute for one Lu Xun the critic”, “exploring one’s own feeling is like getting pregnant, one has to run about to get it”,  ”the whole society is becoming shallow and crass, publications, galleries, exhbibitions, you’d better call it rice-bowl scramble”, “the nation shouldn’t spend money on feeding painters… what if our feeding creates no good painters at all? ” “Artists Association, Writers Association, these are but bureaucratic departments, if everyone gets his hand in arts, art will become a mess!”

sources mainly from the following sites, with translations and minor readaptations:

http://book.sina.com.cn/news/c/2010-06-27/2037270213.shtml

http://book.sina.com.cn/z/wuguanzhong/index.shtml

http://www.chinataiwan.org/twrwk/ywysh/201006/t20100628_1429776.htm