PROVENANCE:

Mountains and trees have been praised and worshiped by Chinese litterateurs and artists for thousands of years, Wu Guanzhong in particular, has a special sentiment to mountains and trees, too. Wu's masterpiece in 1995, "Forest", was inspired by the cypresses revived after struck by lightning, in the suburb of Suzhou. The artist applied a touch of semi-abstract to portray the beauty of real scenery, created a fusion of reality and fantasy; he took the broader view of the scene rather than focusing on the feature of a single object, the spirit of the art of brush and ink was captured on paper. Wu Guanzhong was already in his seventies by late 1990s, but he remained a very vibrant creativity and high enthusiasm about art. By this time, besides continuing his painting of the misty Jiangnan (lands immediately to the south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River) and the northern China in his memory, Wu Guanzhong picked up abstract painting as a major theme of his artistic creations. However, Wu himself did not consider these paintings as works of pure abstract art, and he was very open about the classification between abstract and non-abstract: "picture without obvious material object can also be interpreted as abstract". Yet he has a profounder concept about this: "it is all because the artist is wandering up and down in space, back and forth in memory, trying to express the elapse of time which is hard to capture." Pieces such as "Two Swallows" and "Former Residence of Qiu Jin" are typical works of this period which speak for the artist's creative concepts.

The piece "Landscape" is a painting Wu gave to a friend as a present, on lower left of the picture Wu wrote: "Life After Survival, for He Bing". The large area of ink mark and colorful ink spots embellish in between complement the beauty of each other, create a vibrant variation of rhythm. The mood of the Chinese Xieyi (freehand brushwork in traditional Chinese painting) and the western expressionism achieve a fantastic harmony in this square of paper.