Wu Guanzhong Expressions of Pen and Palette at the National Gallery Singapore Vidya Schalk

22 ARTS & CULTURE

Singapore American · November 2018

Wu Guanzhong

Expressions of Pen and Palette at the National Gallery Singapore (31 Aug 2018 – 30 Sept 2019)

By Dr. Vidya Schalk

“There is only one chance in a lifetime to make a choice. I insist on exploring along the direction that I have identified.” Qitu (The Deviant Way),

by Wu Guanzhong.

A

poignant work is showcased in the exhibition that defines a brilliant artist and the steadfast principles which he stood by even in the face of harsh punishment. The work is called Field Chrysanthemums.

It is small, approximately 12x10”, and has bright yellow chrysanthemum flowers that look like jewels in a bed of green leaves.

China. Every single one of his peers chose to stay in Paris, but Wu felt an obligation to return home in order to aid in the rebuilding of his nascent country.

If you look closely you will notice that this is painted with oil paints on a board, a little blackboard purchased for writing Chairman Mao’s quotes, but instead used for paintings which he kept hidden inside a manure basket.

The same manure basket was used as an easel which earned the artist the nickname “the manure or dung basket artist”.

‘Socialist Realism’ was, at the time, the only acceptable style and artists were entrusted with the duty to represent beautiful imaginings of a utopia and a rendering of a reality to come with the revolution. Art had to follow political guidance and not stray outside the accepted ideological framework.

Any artist who resisted or refused found themselves quickly and forcibly relegated to a labor camp for ‘re-education’.

Wu Guanzhong was one such artist.

Born in 1919, near Yixing, Jiangsu Province ,Wu Guanzhong enrolled to study electrical engineering at Zhejiang University. He became besotted with art after visiting his artist friend Zhu Dequn and, much against his father’s wishes, transferred into Hangzhou Academy of Art to study oil painting in 1936. During his time at the Hangzhou Academy, Wu benefitted from the radical decision to merge guohua (Chinese painting) and xihua (Western painting) which provide grounding in both traditions forming the foundation for his artistic development.

In 1937, when the Sino-Japanese War broke out, Li Fengmian, the President of the school, led the students and teachers of the National Arts Academy of Hangzhou to leave Hangzhou by boat and flee to Longhushan in Jiangxi where they found an old Daoist temple and decided to set up school there. But, without tables or chairs or dormitories or a kitchen, how would this be possible? To add to their troubles, a group of students looking to paint scenery was attacked by bandits. So once again they had to pack up and relocate their school to Guixi, this time seeking refuge

Field Chrysanthemums (I), 1972, Oil on Board Photo courtesy of National Gallery Singapore

in a Catholic mission. Guixi was threatened so the 70 or so staff and students were not able to stay there for long and moved to Changsha. Changsha was destroyed in the great fire set as part of a disastrous scorched earth policy. Thus, they journeyed further westward and, in spring, the entire school relocated to Yuanling in the Hunan Province where they were joined by some staff and students from the Beijing Academy and formed the new National Academy of Art. Under these extraordinary circumstances Wu Guanzhong began his undergraduate studies and studied oil painting under Chang Shuhong and Guan Liang and also learned Chinese painting. The school had to relocate once again to Guiyang and eventually further west near Kunming where they were safe from bombs, but with thousands of refugees.

Even under these desperate conditions, classes were held in an old temple and they even managed to hold exhibitions.

The art students resolutely kept moving as the Japanese advanced and classes continued even under these uncertain conditions. It was during this period that constraints in procuring oil paints and supplies led Wu Guanzhong to turn to the Chinese Painting Department and learn the Chinese art techniques from the renowned Pan Tianshou. Wu finally graduated from the National Arts Academy of Hangzhou after six long years in 1942.

It was also during this time that he adopted the pen name ‘Wu Tucha’ which he shortened to ‘Tu’ and became his signature in many of his paintings as a means to encourage himself to virtue. Tu, a bitter tea with a sweet aftertaste, was a true reflection of the bittersweet life he had experienced in the course of his creative career.

The section of the exhibit titled My Land showcases his works about his motherland followed by a section titled Jiangnan. The scenery of Jiangnan region provided Wu with his favorite landscape. When oil painting experts from the Soviet Union came to visit Jiangnan it was such an alien landscape to them that they considered it to be a subject ill-suited for oil paintings. For Wu however, the water villages of Jiangnan were quintessentially Chinese and a perfect subject matter to use a western medium like ‘oil’ and bridge the gap to indigenize oil painting with Chinese aesthetics. This is superbly illustrated by capturing the black roofline and the white walls of the buildings in oil yet giving it an appearance of black ink on white paper. The black, white and grey blocks of roof tiles and walls form moving and rhythmic patterns. To evoke the colors of lakes and mountains, along with silver and gray tones, to bring out the misty veiled beauty of these water villages, Wu used diluted oil pigments.

His love for Jiangnan was not only due to his ancestral roots in the neighboring Yixing, but also his great admiration for Lu Xun, a native of nearby Shaoxing. Fearless of power throughout his life, Lu Xun criticized the ill of his time and opposed feudalism, ignorance and superstition and was a leading figure of modern Chinese literature. Many of his classic novels were based in the region – there is even a crater on Mercury and an asteroid named after Lu Xun. Wu Guanzhong had regarded Lu Xun as his role model since his youth and quite naturally portraying Lu Xun’s literary universe of the Shaoxing and Jiangnan region was an important inspiration for Wu. Wu’s paintings of this region are based on real-life observations. There are tall mountains in Jiangnan, flatlands and interweaving waterways. Wu also tends to use a horizontal or upwards perspective in many of the depictions of the water towns suggesting a viewpoint from a street, a bridge or a riverboat. To get inspiration and gather materials for his paintings, Wu sought scenes and areas described in Lu Xun’s novels. We are very fortunate to have several works depicting Jiangnan in this exhibition.

Immediately after returning from France, Wu spent some time in Shaoxing sketching from life, but because of political tumult, he was able to return there only in 1976 at the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Wu Guanzhong encountered furious resistance to his new ideas when he returned to China in 1950 and quickly became a subject of attack due to his bourgeois artistic views centered on French formalism, which was in complete contrast to ideology driven 'Socialist Realism'

In the summer of 1946, Wu Guanzhong, who had scored exceptionally well in his classes, was allowed to enroll for an examination held by the Ministry of Education to select the best students to study abroad. In the winter of the same year, he married Shu Buqin in Nanjing. His results won him a scholarship to study abroad and, in July of 1947, he entered Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and studied there for three years. He admired the works of artists such as Gauguin, Matisse, Utrillo, Cezanne and was especially fond of van Gogh, whose passion for art he found deeply inspiring.

In the summer of 1950, he chose to return home to China full of enthusiasm to share the knowledge he had acquired during his studies in Paris and became a lecturer at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing.

It was a time when young Chinese like Wu were filled with optimistic anticipation of a new China that was being established and his sense of patriotism and a deep love for his motherland compelled Wu’s decision to return to

Quotes from Wu Guanzhong’s writings from the exhibition Photo by Jim Tietjen

23 ARTS & CULTURE

Singapore American · November 2018

and wash establishes continuity with historical Chinese painting even with non-traditional subject matter. Mao’s death in 1976 signalled the end of the Cultural Revolution and this allowed Wu Guanzhong to pursue his own work.

Reposing (Figure), 1990, Oil on Canvas Photo courtesy of National Gallery Singapore

style. Wu could not paint his beloved nudes and had to give up figure painting and turn towards the more innocuous landscape painting in which “ideological error was less easily detected”. He was shunned by the academic art world for his views, including by Xu Beihong, and was forced to hold peripheral teaching jobs for thirteen years.

He spent much of the 1950s and early 1960s traveling the country, as well as Tibet in 1961, with other artists and students to paint the varied landscapes of China. Several of these can be seen in the section of the exhibit entitled The Journey.

The Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, led to serious persecutions and Wu feared being a target of the Red Guard. Afraid of being found in possession of books, pictures, cultural artifacts and the like during the Four Olds Cultural Revolutions movement (the campaign against old ideas, culture, customs and habits), people made bonfires and destroyed these objects so as to not be caught and punished. Wu destroyed decades worth of oil paintings in 1966 before the Red Guards could get to them, but it did not help. He was separated from his family for two years and they were all sent to a rural labor camp at a village in Hebei. It was then he started to produce small intimate oil works that evoked the rural life especially of plants and flowers he saw in the fields, hiding his works in the manure basket. He was forbidden to teach, write or paint for several years.

In 1973, Wu was recalled to Beijing under the directive of Premier Zhou Enlai and began producing large paintings for hotels, restaurants and other public spaces.

To prepare for a large wall at the Beijing Hotel, Wu and several artists traveled along the Yangtze River to sketch ideas and seek inspirations and Wu, over the course of his career, incorporated many of these experiences.

As the Cultural Revolution eased in the early 1970s, in addition to Government commissions, invitations to exhibit also arrived. It was once again safe for Westerninfluenced oil paintings to resurface, but Wu bucked the trend and instead chose to work in the more traditional Chinese medium of ink, yet bring modern aesthetics to this ancient medium of ink painting. The use of line

Song of Autumn, 2007, Chinese in and color on paper Photo courtesy of National Gallery Singapore

Wu Guanzhong’s 'rehabilitation' was marked by an exhibition of his works in 1978 at the Central Academy.

He had his first one-man show, which traveled throughout China. By 1979, Wu was at last given a free hand and he brilliantly combined traditional technique with realism in the details. As with many artists, as their way of life and outlook changed, their art evolved as well. Wu’s ink and brush works are remarkably varied in style and kept evolving throughout his life. From naturalism that is seen in his early works, his later works starting in the 1980s tend to lean towards abstract with swirling lines and brightly colored punctuation marks. His later works are more abstract in nature and his Western studies and oilpainting background shows through. The snaking black lines and clustered dots are actually trails and resting points of a brush making full contact with paper. There are festive and cheerful confetti-like splotches of pink, green and purple that would look lovely on wrapping paper.

His effortless skills in visualizing and bringing out spirit and beauty just with a few lines is a feast for the eyes.

Use of color is done with such great skill and delicately and deliberately draws the eye, encouraging you to follow the lines as they take you through the painting.

Exhibition sections titled Beyond the Image is an excellent study of Wu Guanzhong’s transition from figurative to the abstract, with trees forming the subject matter and capturing the essence ‘between likeness and unlikeness’.

In 1981, Wu Guanzhong went abroad and visited Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Mali as the leader of the Chinese artists delegation and met up with old friends in Paris on his way. In 1986, Wu exhibited in Hong Kong and the next year he visited India. In 1988, the 69 year old Wu came to Singapore to attend the opening ceremony of Wu Guanzhong’s Painting Exhibition hosted by the National Museum of Singapore and NAFA. He returned back to Singapore in 1990. He travelled to various countries and had solo exhibitions in major art galleries and museums within China and around the world.

In 1992, Wu’s paintings were exhibited at the British Museum – a first for a living Chinese artist – which won him recognition as one of China’s most original artists, thus becoming a darling of Asian and Western collectors. For Wu, it was never about fame or wealth, so much so that, in June of 2010 at the age of 91 when his works were much sought after and collectors willing to pay millions, he pulled out 200 of his artworks he was dissatisfied with and burned them. And not for the first time either. He also generously made numerous substantial donations of his works to art museums in China, Hong Kong and Singapore. In 2008, he donated 113 of his artworks to the Singapore Art Museum, now part of the National Collection.

Wu Guanzhong’s love for life, his country and his people was sincere, as was his passion and dedication to his art.

He was highly prolific in both oil and ink painting and well known for his eloquent writings on art and creativity.

Forty years after he left Paris, Wu Guanzhong, at the age of 71, lamented the destruction of all his nude works including oil paintings, drawings and sketches during the

Forgotten Flowers, 2005, Chinese ink on paper Photo courtesy of National Gallery Singapore

ten-year long ravage of the Cultural Revolution. In the twilight years of his artistic career and life, he took on nude painting again with an Eastern touch, much different from the ones he had painted in his youth. These are displayed in the section titled Nudes in Twilight. In New Rhythms of Tradition, Wu has very creatively re-interpreted famous paintings from the Tang and Song dynasties and given them a modern twist with current aesthetic viewpoints. His hope was to encourage future artists to add their own take on these classic artworks.

The final section of the exhibition is aptly titled Landscape of Life, which features some lovely works that show reflections gleaned from life, innovations in the artists sunset years and expression of contemplations in visual splendor, ranging from deep black to exuberance of color.

The exhibition is titled Expressions of Pen and Palette and has very thoughtfully placed a selection of around 50 of Wu’s works, both oils and ink paintings – many from significant private collections, along with quotes from Wu’s eloquent writings. It is of great help to understand what prompted him to create that specific artwork and gives us insight into his feelings, emotions and thoughts as he created these beautiful works. The words add another layer of meaning to the works and help us to appreciate them in a more intimate way.

Prior to coming to Singapore Dr. Vidya Schalk worked as a Cancer Biologist Research Scientist at Oregon State University.

Since coming to Singapore, she has taken the opportunity to indulge in her passion for history and travel. She is currently an active volunteer docent at the National Gallery, Asian Civilisations Museum, National Museum and STPI.