WU GUANZHONG (1919-2010)

As a great modernizer of traditional Chinese ink painting, Wu Guanzhong devoted his life to the continued development of the genre-always treading between east and west, abstraction and objective reality, his paintings pushed through the boundaries of tradition and revealed to his audiences the tremendous possibilities of the ink medium. Even though his paintings seem non-traditional, they still retain the spirit of Chinese culture. Wu uses the line to create a fluidity and structure that adhere to the principle of Chinese paintings. In the late 1970s, Wu began to focus on ink painting and by the 1990s, his experimentation with formalism and abstraction had reached the zenith of his artistic development, resulting in the creation of his own distinctive style.
With his uniquely rhythmic lines and characteristic colour dots, Fishing Boats is an example of Wu's exploration of abstraction and objectivity during the mid-1980s. as he continued to explore form and reinforce the connection with objective reality, using traces of concrete details in the process of abstraction as seen here in Fishing Boats. The style of this work paved the way to his more abstract works later, and is an important piece in Wu's oeuvre, charting the artistic development of this influential artist.