WU GUANZHONG | Bamboo Forest of the Lijiang River

Important Private Asian Collection

Art of Wu Guanzhong 60s – 90s, China Three Gorges Publishing House, Beijing, 1996, p. 98
Shui Tianzhong & Wang Hua, ed., The Complete Works of Wu Guanzhong Vol. 3, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, Changsha, 2007, p. 138-139
Wu Keyu, ed., World Famous Painter: Wu Guanzhong, Hebei Education Publishing House, Shijiazhuang, 2010, p. 62-63

The work is overall in very good and its original condition. There is no sign of restoration under UV light examination.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

A Postwar Traveller who Returned East In 1946, Wu Guanzhong became the first artist after the Japanese War to win a full scholarship from the government to study in France. While Zao Wou-Ki and Chu Teh-Chun remained in France for the rest of their lives, Wu Guanzhong returned to China in 1950 upon completing his studies to pursue his artistic and teaching careers. By doing so, he kept an important bloodline for modern art alive under socialist China: when Soviet realist painting dominated the art scene, Wu championed the modern spirit of Lin Fengmian and Wu Dayu, and taught at different institutions such as Tsinghua University and the Central Academy of Fine Art. His protégés included Wang Huaiqing, and Huang Guanyu from Tongdairen Group, and his influences became a catalyst to the ’85 New Wave movement. Even in the 1970s when resources were extremely scarce, he still used all means possible to see the great landscapes and natural scenery of China, discovering remote villages unknown to most, through which he expressed his ideas, forming a bold new chapter in the thousand-year history of Chinese landscape painting after the Japanese War.

“For my landscape paintings, I travelled to many places. While great travel destinations are many, subjects for painting are few,” Wu Guanzhong said. In the 1970s, he travelled to Guilin three times, commencing a grand series spanning across two decades using Guilin’s scenery of unrivalled beauty as the subject, which showed his unique affinity to this region. In the upcoming evening sale, Sotheby’s will present two of his masterpieces from the Guilin Series -Bamboo Forest of the Lijiang River (Lot 1047) and A Village in Guilin (Lot 1048). Both paintings were created as a result of Wu’s trip to Guilin in 1978 and it is perhaps serendipity that they now both appear in the same sale. The two paintings demonstrate the artist’s dedicated pursuit of perfection, as well as his ingenuity in different innovations based on the same subject; the results were two paintings of unique brilliance that also enhance the impact of each other when appearing side by side.

Bamboo Forest of the Lijiang River :
An Eastern Classic via Western Painting Theories

In National School of Fine Arts, Wu initially majored in Western oil painting. His artistic foundation was built upon the great impressionist and modern artists such as Cézanne and Matisse. If one were to analyse the artist’s creative model throughout his life, he/she may realise that once Wu found a subject of great inspirations, he would then continue to create and refine his work based on that subject, eventually producing a series of works of unique characteristics. This approach is not unlike the great impressionist artists - Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, Monet’s waterlilies, and Renoir’s bathing women. For Wu, such a subject is Guilin. Bamboo Forest of the Lijiang River depicts the tranquil wilderness along the shore of Guilin’s Lijiang River: in the centre is a green mountain whose peaks reach up to the clouds, its presence powerful and commanding, its texture possessing a vibrant three-dimensionality. The size of the foreground area is deliberately reduced, while the mountain ranges at the back are just about visible, contrasting the lush, thick bamboo forest on the right hand side in the mid-ground of the painting. For Wu, the bamboo forest is an essential subject in the Guilin Series. His insistence on using bamboo as his subject is in a way related to his upbringing. His hometown Yixing in Jiangsu is famous for its bamboo forests, and years of observations had inspired the artist to find ways to represent bamboo through different compositions in his paintings. On his drawing board whose dimension is finite, the artist revealed via this painting his strong foundation in Western painting spatial awareness, but he did not limit himself to the use of Western one-point perspective. Instead, Wu continually moved as he drew, forming an intricately composed image resulted from bold selection and rearrangement of materials he saw based on his personal aesthetic insights. Bamboo Forest of the Lijiang River finds its origin from reality, and yet it is not merely depicting reality. Instead it fuses together subjective feelings and physical objects as well as natural scenery, expressing the artist’s unique sense of aesthetics as the subjective and objective meet and cross over.

Bamboo has been a favourite subject of literati scholars since Tang and Song Dynasties. While outstanding bamboo paintings from the past were numerous, Wu Guanzhong felt that the imageries in these paintings were somewhat monotonous, without a strong connection between each bamboo branch, and the compositions lacked a sense of depth and thickness. He understood the forms and colours of bamboo intimately, and knew that they were not optimal for expressing the unique qualities of the oil paint. He thus paid special attention to the colours and details – on the dark green bamboo branches, some leaves are olive green, some are mint, while some are light green, interwoven and juxtaposed with each other, representing the front-facing, back-facing, vertical-lying and horizontal-lying leaves in such an endlessly varying sea of green. His technique incorporated Western art concepts of transforming visions into geometric shapes and physics. The formal beauty expressed in Bamboo Forest of the Lijiang River is a result of the artist’s observation of the bamboo forests, as well as an idea already well-composed within the artist’s mind, and his ability to express the presence and integrity of Eastern aesthetics using the medium of oil painting.

“In Guilin, I climbed onto the mountains where colours are multi-layered. I took in the elegant beauty of the landscape in front of me. I look at the mountains, and I look at what was behind the mountains. These layers are clear yet also fuzzy. The grand mountains cradled small villages - vibrant patches of colours hidden within the deep, dark valley. The scenery was delightful, the landscape was captured in painting,”
Wu Guanzhong Guilin, Huayan

A Village in Guilin:
An Expressive Spirit of Ink within a Misty Domain

Although oil is traditionally a Western painting medium, Wu Guanzhong’s oil paintings are filled with Eastern appeals. It was because the artist began studying ink paintings extensively since the 1970s, during which he began a period of exploration using oil and ink, forging a new path of sinicizing oil painting through a combined approach of theories and practices. It was also during this period that his life drawings began to depart from representational painting and focused on the expression of ink-painting philosophy and mental landscape built upon the foundation of figurative depictions. In  A Village in Guilin, one can see the artist’s process in breaking free from the constraints of painting medium and moving towards the beauty of a painting’s form, his development of a brand new approach that connects the ancient with the contemporary, the East to the West. The composition of A Village in Guilin is complex and clearly layered – the mountains in the distance each displays its own form and shape, on the top right hand corner, the mountains faraway are just about visible, somewhat blended into the sky, the result is a deep visual effect. The fields in the front are painted in a plain style, encapsulating the complex imagery with simplicity, the golden-yellow colour scheme make clear that autumn is well on its way; between the two are a few small white huts against the mountains, their presence instils a sense of liveliness into the picture.

Wu Guanzhong lived in Southern China in his childhood and youth, travelled to Europe in the 1940s to study, and moved to Beijing upon his return in 1950. The dry weather in Northern China was a sharp contrast with the mild climate in the south, so each time the artist travelled south for his drawing trips, the familiarity feeling would remind the artist of his hometown. Although oil is a medium with high viscosity, Wu Guanzhong had found a way to display the dry, wet, dark and light effects in Chinese ink painting. In particular, his wet-brush, abstract depiction of Guilin’s humidity and the sense of homesickness suffusing the air remind the viewer of the cloudy mountains in the paintings of Mi Fu from Northern Song dynasty. Four decades after it was completed, A Village in Guilin’s impact remains fresh and immediate today, continually nourishing the viewer’s visual sensation. The artist’s use of oil paint to create a wet-brush effect is not only paying homage to traditional Chinese aesthetics, but also a challenge to Western impressionist art. Impressionist art introduced science into art by capturing the intricate changes on objects as light shines onto it, using it as its life drawing basis. Wu Guanzhong, on the other hand, departed from the haphazard element of this creative process, integrating non-visual senses such as the feeling on one’s skin. With much internationalisation and reflection, his paintings are results of phenomena in the physical world balanced with one’s internal domain.

Extraordinary Mountain Ranges as Witness to a Historical Turning Point

Rustic and filled with small-village sentiments, Bamboo Forest of the Lijiang River and A Village in Guilin are intimately connected to the artist’s upbringing and life events. In the 1960s and 70s when the artist’s home country was undergoing enormous changes, the many setbacks he experienced did not erode his strength nonetheless – in contrast, he turned them into enrichments of his life experiences and became even more committed in his pursuit of his art. In 1978, two years after the cultural revolution, China was reforming and social development was also on track. At the turn of such a new historical era, the artist’s depictions of a lush green bamboo forest in Bamboo Forest of the Lijiang River and the mild, nourishing landscape in A Village in Guilin are more than depictions of natural landscapes. They are also infused with a sense of hope and anticipation towards the future. Through the jubilant and uplifting depiction of Guilin, the artist looked forward to the new days to come.