Wu Guanzhong, a master of Chinese painting, passed away last Friday at the age of 91. A leading figure in the history of modern and contemporary Chinese art, Wu helped shape the course of Chinese art in the 20th century, while securing a reputation as a strong market performer and a prominent intellectual, who was never sparing in offering incisive and poignant social and cultural criticism.

Wu was born in the 1919, the tumultuous year of the “May 4th” social movement in China. After graduating from the National Arts Academy of Hangzhou, Wu went to study at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts (ENSBA) in 1947 in Paris on a competitive government scholarship. Fully immersed in the art and culture in the European art capital, Wu called himself “an adopted child” of the East and the West.

Upon returning to his motherland in 1950s, Wu started teaching at the Central Academy of Art, where he introduced Western art to his students. Yet, under the censorship of the 1950s, Wu was forced to transfer his teaching job between different academies and institutes as well as switch his subject matter from figurative painting to landscape painting. The artist was later banned from teaching and painting at the start of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.

During the 1970s, Wu had to switch again from oil painting to ink and water painting due to a severe nationwide commodity shortage, which unexpectedly offered an opportunity for him to establish his signature style, combining the tonal variations of Chinese ink and the formal principles of Western paintings. Never deterred by the attacks and criticism, Wu carried on his experimentation with perseverance and determination. A committed perfectionist, he was known to have destroyed a large number of his artworks. Describing his perfectionism, he once said, “Unsatisfying works should never get out (of the studio).”

Having survived the Cultural Revolution that ended in 1976, Wu had his first major survey in 1979 at National Art Museum of China, which introduced the public to new perspectives in Chinese modern art. Beginning in the 1980s, he further experimented with abstract forms and subtle ink tones in his landscape paintings, which often feature white houses with black roofs enveloped by rivers snaking through a village or against the background of misty gray mountains. In “Concerning the Beauty of the Abstract,” an essay written in 1960s and published in the Meishu ("Fine Arts") magazine in 1980, Wu boldly unveiled and criticized the taboo of the abstract art in China, declaring “the beauty of the abstract is the essence of the aesthetics of the forms,” which was also evident in his 1960 series of pen and ink drawings of the nostalgic Chinese country scenes.

In a debate over the role of ink and water painting as a technique or the soul of Chinese painting, “The value of the Chinese painting derives from the abstract and expressive ink and water strokes within a meaningful composition," Wu wrote in his 1992 article published in Hong Kong’s Ming Pao Weekly,"Ink and water painting evolves with the need of expression."

As an art educator, Wu never reserved his criticism against the rigidity of the fine-arts education system. Concerned about the future of Chinese art, he often made trips to visit young and emerging artists living in Beijing’s artist villages, like Songzhuang. Viewing the commercialization of the Chinese art and the newly established gallery system in China in recent years, Wu said, “Art comes from the heart and the mind, which are not for sale. So in a sense, being an artist is not a job.” Despite the commercial success, Wu still led a simple and frugal life. Over the years, he donated his million-dollar masterpieces to major museums in China and Singapore. The artist explained, “There's no doubt that some of my donated works will be forgotten by most as history progresses. I only wish to make my works accessible to my people and available for their criticism."

Currently, the National Art Museum of China in Beijing is planning a major retrospective of Wu's work in his memory.