Wu Guanzhong

Wu Guanzhong is one of the best known contemporary painters of Chinese origin. Wu has painted various aspects of China including much of its architecture, plants, animals, people, as well as many of its landscapes and waterscapes in a style reminiscent of the impressionist painters of the early 1900s.
He has published collections of essays and dozens of painting albums.
His paintings were exhibited at the British Museum in 1992, which was a first for a living Chinese artist.

Wu was born in Yixing, Jiangsu Province, in 1919. In 1936 he enrolled at the National Arts Academy of Hangzhou, studying both Chinese and Western painting under Pan Tianshou and Lin Fengmian . In 1947 Wu travelled to Paris to study at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts on a government scholarship. He has told of his admiration for Utrillo, Braque, Matisse, Gauguin, Cézanne and Picasso, and especially for Van Gogh, to whose grave he has made pilgrimage.

Wu introduced aspects of Western art to his students at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing. The Academy was known to have been dominated by social realism and Wu was called "a fortress of bourgeois formalism". Refusing to conform to political dogma, he was transferred from one academy to another. At the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, he was banned from painting, writing and teaching, and in 1970 was sent to Hebei province for hard labour.

Wu's paintings have the colour sense and formal principles of Western paintings, but a spirit and tonal variations of ink that are typically Chinese. Natural scenery is reduced to its essentials - simple but powerful abstract forms.
Wu Guangzhong has had solo exhibitions in major art galleries and museums around the world, including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Taipei, Korea, England and the USA.

Early in his career Guanzhong adopted the pen name Tu, which he uses to sign his work.

His work is held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Biography

1919 Born in Yixing county, Jiangsu Province, China
1942 Graduated from National Arts Academy, Hangzhou
1946 - 50 Studied oil painting at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris

1950 - 53 Lecturer at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing
1953 - 55 Associate Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing
1956 - 64 Associate Professor and Director of Teaching and Research at the
Beijing Fine Arts Normal College

1964 - 79 Professor at the Central Institute of Arts and Crafts, Beijing
1979 Elected director of Standing Committee, Chinese Artists' Association
1981 Elected member of National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference
1991 Received the honour "Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres" from the French Ministry of Culture
1992 Exhibition "Wu Guanzhong: A Twentieth-Century Chinese Painter" at the British Museum, London