WU GUANZHONG James Cahill and Tsao Hsingyuan, August 1988 The Painting of Wu Guanzhong
A problem in writing about Chinese painting of recent decades is that it seems to exhibit no sensible pattern of change, none of the developmental designs that we are familiar with. History has not allowed that; there is much about contemporary Chinese art and artists that seems anomolous, even unintelligible, without reference to the convulsions of China's recent past. The painting of Wu Guanzhong is an example. Here is the work of a painter born in 1919, whose progress to maturity was certainly not retarded, but who comes to prominence only in the late 1970s and 1980s. And then he breaks upon us suddenly, as a new phenomenon to reckon with. He appears in a new flurry of exhibitions and publications along with some promising younger painters, but what we find in his works is far more than promise: it is authority, confident achievement, a new style. And we realize that he is one of the artists to whom we must pay most attention in our pursuit of answers, however premature, to the questions that press upon us: Where is Chinese painting going? How far, and with what success, will it attempt to join the world mainstream, and what will be the consequences for its Chineseness? What relationship can it preserve with past traditions in China, and at what cost to its modernity and originality?
Wu Guanzhong's art is not in itself especially difficult to undertand, for anyone familiar with the difficult progress of art and society in twentieth century China. His works are full of the features most characteristic of Chinese art of this century, features deriving from the meeting and interaction of western and eastern art. As China confronts the rest of the world, her long and rich traditions can sustain her artists, but can also be a heavy burden on their backs. For them, it has been a period of transition: straining, pausing to ponder, rising with new force. Aware of standing before the whole twentieth-century world, China's artists must address the problem of how to continue in their own tradition while learning from foreign ones, how to fuse western and eastern art into some kind of unity. Among these artists Wu Guanzhong stands out as one of the leaders. He himself exemplifies the unceasing distress and constant searching of recent Chinese painting, and his art is a crystallization of that distress and searching.
Over many years, Wu has been hesitating at the crossroads of the western and eastern traditions. His early experience of culture and training in art, which he can never forget, under such masters as Lin Fengmian and Pan Tienshou, was of course Chinese; but his three years of study in Paris introduced him to a new western aesthetic and influenced him profoundly. By observing his works in sequence we can see something that began as a confrontation of two artistic systems changing gradually to become a reconciliation of contraries. His distress has arisen from his having both a deep knowledge of the Chinese aesthetic, on the highest level, and a mastery of the realistic techniques of the west. These two may initially have seemed like oil and water, unmixable, and yet he could not choose between them. If he favored either tradition over the other, his situation would have been simpler; that he did not want to give up either has made it more difficult for him.
Wu Guanzhong's biography is recounted in Li Chu-tsing's excellent essay for this catalogue, and need not be repeated here. A crucial episode for understanding him is of course his aforementioned three-year period of study in Paris. We might be in a better position to assess its impact on his art if someone had made a serious general study of the larger problem of Chinese artists who went to Europe to learn Western styles at first hand. (Valuable contributions in this direction have already been made in the writings of Michael Sullivan and in the recent exhibition catalog China-Paris: Seven Chinese Painters who Studied in France, 1918-1960, Taipei, 1988.) In such a context, Wu Guanzhong's case might well stand out as near-unique. It is obviously different from the cases of artists who remained abroad, such as his friend Chao Wu-chi (Zao Wouki), and who accordingly have been more thoroughly absorbed into the foreign tradition, however much they may want to, and claim to, remain Chinese. But it is also different from others who have chosen to return to China after such study. Artists who make that choice are typically drawn back into the Chinese painting tradition after their return--presumably their choice is itself a sign of intentions that way. But in the best-known cases, those of Xu Beihong and Wu Zuoren, the foreign and Chinese styles remain as alternatives, not truly fused: realistic painting in oils, or ink painting in the Chinese manner, with only limited accomodations of the one to the other. We can note also that the adherence of these other artists to academic European models has inhibited their ability, and the ability of recent Chinese painting as a whole, to respond fruitfully to the transformations and achievements of Western painting in the 20th century.
Wu Guanzhong has gone much further than they in his integration of style across the two mediums and the two traditions. In his oil paintings he finds technical equivalents for the range of brushstroke types, the setting of sharply linear elements against broad "washed" grounds, the nuances of tone, that are typical of ink paintings in the Chinese tradition--a notable example is his (Oil #2). Conversely, in his recent guohua or "Chinese-style" paintings he expands the capacity of brushline and wash to achieve Post-Impressionist-like effects of flattened, all-but-abstract design. One can make pairings--for instance, the 1985 oil "Village Town" (no. ) with the 1986 guohua "Zhou Village" (no. )--that seem to reduce the difference in medium to insignificance. There are other painters, such as the overseas Chinese master Wang Chi-ch'ien, whose practice of oil painting has affected their style in such aspects as their use of color, or the submersion of distinct brushstrokes into textured surface. But it is difficult to think of another who can move so smoothly between oil and ink as Wu Guanzhong.
Having recognized this, we must recognize also that some of Wu's best effects, in his recent guohua paintings, are achieved through techniques that are impossible in oils. The style for which he is probably best known, in which images of old trees or rock gardens or the Great Wall are caught in configurations of long, sinuous lines, depend on the capacity of the Chinese brush to trace seemingly endless, even line, "like a silkworm spinning out its thread" (as an early critic wrote of Gu Kaizhi). The Chinese brush can do this because it is constructed with a reservoir to hold ink and a fine but resilient tip that can release it in the thinnest of marks; the stiffer, less flexible brush used for oil painting allows no such fluency, quite apart from the greater viscosity of the oil pigment itself, which resists this extreme attenuation. (The drip technique of Pollock, to which Wu Guanzhong's style is sometimes likened, was an escape from those limitations, and one that the Chinese medium would not have required--although the Chinese, too, had their ink-drippers and splashers, as early as the eighth century.)
The capacity of the Chinese ink-painting medium for linear renderings of form had been exploited by Chinese artists from the earliest times, and even after the line-and-color-wash technique of the archaic style had been supplanted by styles no longer based on a clear separation of line and wash, styles that employed a greater variety of brushstroke-types, some artists continued to use linear manners for some of their work--one thinks of Wang Meng in the Yuan period, Tang Yin in the Ming, Gong Xian in the early Qing. The graphic or linear styles of these artists, however, are usually to be read as cursive, time-saving renderings of forms that would otherwise be depicted with more care and detail. In these sketchy works, the line must move as if unimpeded, with an effect of casual spontaneity, while actually performing its descriptive function. Line, in these Chinese works of the later periods, is usually not proper outline; the artists tend to avoid bounding their forms with continuous contour-defining line, depending instead on repetitions and interweavings of brushstrokes into clusters of line without firm boundaries, sometimes (as in Gong Xian's works) compounding the contour drawing by retracing it with additional brushstrokes. Here their practice differs from that of typical line drawing in works by modern European artists such as Matisse, Picasso, or Miro, in which the line is more likely to have the effect of seeming to define flat or curving planes, cleanly and distinctly.
Wu Guanzhong moves between these two types of line-drawing, making free use of both traditions. In some of his works, such as the paintings of old trees, it is the multiplying and tangling of brushlines that constitutes the form; in others, notably his architectural pictures (including the powerful depictions of ruined cities) the line functions to bound flat shapes, which are usually presented frontally. In some of the finest paintings of this kind, such as the Two Swallows (no. ) or "Neighboring Houses" (#20),the rectilinear precision of the drawing and elegant proportioning of forms lead to effects of order, refinement, restraint. In others, such as Alley (no. ), the lines trace a more idiosyncratic course, and the resulting warping of planes seems more a European expressionist than a Chinese kind of distortion. The fluidity of movement of his ink-loaded brush is Chinese, but its movements, whether guided by his subconscious or independent of his will, are charged with the conceptions of modern western art. Here, again, Wu's distress drives him to pursue constantly the reconciliation of two contradictory cultures. In the interesting composition of his "Village of the Wu River" (# ) we can similarly find echoes of German expressionist style along with a notable impact of the Southern Sung Academy masters Ma Yuan and Xia Gui.
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