Revolutionary Ink: The Paintings of Wu Guanzhong

Asia Society, New York

Through Aug. 5

In China, Wu Guanzhong’s work is “regarded as something of a national treasure,” said Rachel Wolff in The Wall Street Journal. The Paris-trained artist, who died at the age of 90 in 2010, had a fruitful late career producing large-scale, often abstract variations on traditional Chinese ink painting. Earlier in his career, Wu painted Western-style portraits and nudes, but he reportedly destroyed most of them in 1966, at the outset of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Prohibited from painting for several years, he adopted a new style once government restrictions eased. He put aside oils to instead work with ink on paper, and began creating lyrical landscapes that married Eastern and Western traditions. By the time he produced the “almost Jackson Pollock–like Wisteria (1991),” his style had become so loose and abstract that the image seemed to hover “somewhere between a haunted forest scene and a frenetic emotional state.”

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The works now on view at the Asia Society have “no clear political content,” said Allan M. Jalon in the Los Angeles Times. Yet the cultural history that produced them seems to increase their power. Wu, after all, never abandoned his mission of integrating Eastern and Western styles, nor did he waver in the love he had for his homeland. He described himself as “a snake swallowing an elephant”—the snake being the Chinese artist in him and the elephant, Western art. He seemed to have no problem getting his jaws unhinged. One 1986 painting, which depicts the Great Wall’s “undulating path” through mountains, “recalls David Hockney’s paintings of roads through the hills of Los Angeles.” The brushstrokes, meanwhile, evoke centuries-old Chinese traditions.