Two Swallows was a painting of which he was deeply proud. Western artists, such as Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and Swiss painter Paul Klee (1879-1940), studied the “golden section” to achieve the most beautiful composition through geometric divisions of the canvas, and Wu experienced the joy of such divisions when doing Two Swallows. While waiting for his train in Ningbo in 1981, he saw several unique residences and quickly did sketches. Later, at home he inked and washed his brush to his favorite silver-gray tone and nimbly brushed a few lines across the white paper, dividing it into a few geometric blocks of different sizes. He found to his great satisfaction that those horizontal lines, rectangular white spaces and vertical black oblongs formed balanced contrasts that complied with both Western formal precision and Oriental aesthetics. He remarked: “Mondrian’s geometric formations pursued the simplicity and purity of beauty, but they are vague or silent on emotional content. Two Swallows expresses clearly an Oriental sentiment – the two swallows fly away but their love for their homeland remains.”

Wu Guanzhong was born and grew up in a southern watertown. The painter went abroad to study in his youth and settled down in northern China after his return. His works express the love of a traveling soul for his hometown, rendered in techniques borrowed from the West. This enhanced his formal appeal and blended the mood of Chinese ink-and-wash with the modern expressionism of the West. His unique approach invested his works with both formal simplicity and the smoothness of modernism, while still conveying the tranquility and sentiment of tradition. The few simple strokes in Two Swallows are freighted with meaning, and Wu loved this approach and in subsequent years created more such works, including The Former Residence of Qiu Jin and A Reminiscence of South China. Based on these works, he later developed his symbolic language for watertown motifs – a horizontal line stands for a roof and a vertical line for a door or a window; they are key symbols in the language of Chinese art.

He later developed his symbolic language for watertown motifs – a horizontal line stands for a roof and a vertical line for a door or a window; they are key symbols in the language of Chinese art.

In his later years, Wu created many quasi-abstract paintings, such as Lion Grove and The Soul of the Pine. By “quasi-abstract,” he meant to make an abstruse art form more comprehensible to ordinary viewers, which he believes is the obligation of artists. Lion Grove is a famous garden in Suzhou, and its manifold Taihu rocks look like a pride of lions when observed from a distance. Wu found the garden was full of abstract lineal beauty, but he was afraid that viewers wouldn’t understand if he represented it only in a combination of dots and lines. So he strategically placed a few recognizable images in the composition, such as a bridge and a pavilion. These small additions do not interfere with the quality of the work so art circles also applauded the painting. To win “both the approval of experts and the admiration of the public” was Wu’s criterion for his processes and creations.

A work by Wu Guanzhong was worth tens of millions of yuan even in his lifetime, but the master artist lived an incredibly humble life. He wore clothes that had been abandoned by his children and had his hair cut by a streetside barber in his neighborhood. In the 1990s, Taiwan artist Liu Guosong paid a visit to his home and was shown into a bedroom that had two single beds against the two side walls with an aisle in between. When he asked to see Wu’s studio, Wu took out a board from one of the side walls and placed it across the two beds. “That’s it,” he said to his dumbfounded visitor. Even in the last years of his life when he had a separate studio, it was no larger than 15 square meters.

It was under such Spartan conditions that the great master obtained international recognition and set new precedents for English and French institutions. In 1992 the British Museum broke its rule of exhibiting only ancient relics and hosted a solo show for a living artist, “Wu Guanzhong: A 20th-century Chinese Painter.” The museum also obtained Wu’s latest work in colored ink, a large-scale Bird’s Paradise, for its permanent collection. In 1993, Wu Guanzhong’s works went on exhibit in Paris and were presented with the “Gold Medal of Paris.” In 2000 he was elected a communication academician of the Art Academy of the French Institute and became the first Chinese, and also the first Asian, to receive such an honor in the institute’s 200-year history.