The Fusion Of Abstractness And Concreteness

In the middle of1970s, China reopened its door to the West and restarted tocommunicate with the rest of the world after the Cultural Revolution. The Chinesepaintings, without exception, appeared again on the stage of international paintingfield through books and periodicals, exhibitions and governmental ornongovernmental art exchanges. Among many high-profile Chinese artists, WuGuanzhong has become one of the best painters by his unique paintings and artqualities. No matter whether they are ink paintings or oil paintings, Wu’s works havebecome a model which units the East and West and fuses tradition and modernity. Asone of the most significant artists in the history of Chinese art, he was also recognizedas one of representatives of the modern Chinese paintings in20thcentury.Wu’s artistic views and painting practice structurally shocked Chinese art.Throughout his anthology and painting collections, we can feel that his works are notlimited to tradition or to be conservative, or not seeking for illusory and fantasticpost-modernistic art which is divorced from life and reality neither, but stress bothformal and abstract beauty of drawings and enable formality subordinated itself to theinner heart. In this way, the significance can be found in concreteness and abstractnessand the interests in written form and expressed emotion. Developing from concrete tosemi-abstract and then to abstract art, Wu Guanzhong’s paintings style not onlyremain on the stage of abstractness but in the back-and-forth rotation of concretenessand abstractness. It demonstrates a high level fusion of these two expressivecharacteristics in his painting works. For example in painting figurative art, he did notsimply paint scenery and accurately reflect the objectives but was often haunted byartistic conception and reorganized the refined objectives after breaking the limit ofshapes and colors in them in terms of the rules of formal beauty; in choosing materials,for instance, he usually redrew the pictures he had drawn before by different paintingmaterials. When he changed the style of those pictures, he did not incompletelyreplace old views by new style, but made up and exaggerate them to emphasize thesense of his heart by extracting old elements, in order to seize the audience’s soul andgive them violent aesthetic feelings. It was the mutual covert and fusion of two artisticstyles that had added a different appearance for his works which were attractive enough to his audience especially by its innovation. However, it does make senses toresearch the fusion relations of concreteness and abstractness in Wu Guanzhong’spaintings. However, as a key man in artistic history, Wu Guanzhong skillfullycombined with Modernist art before the founding of new China and Pure artadvocated in1980s and Abstract art in1990by the mutual fusion relations betweenconcreteness and abstractness presented in painting works, which is constituting acomplete clue in this article. On this point, Wu Guanzhong had made a significantcontribution to the progress of development of Chinese art in the twenty century.