SPACE September 2025 (No. 694)
Bitter Melon Homestead (1998), oil on canvers, collection of Hong Kong Museum of Art, donated by Wu Guanzhong and his family. Image courtesy of Seoul Arts Center
This July 25, the first solo exhibition in Korea of Wu Guanzhong (1919 – 2010), a master of modern Chinese art, opened at the Calligraphy Museum in the Seoul Arts Center. The exhibition presents 17 of his representative works, donated to the Hong Kong Museum of Art, in chronological order. Wu, known for his distinctive style which fuses the sensibility of traditional ink painting with the expressive techniques of Western modernism, began his career with ink painting and later expanded into oil painting, conveying emotional states and drawing detailed landscapes out of abstract compositions.
The exhibition starts with his representative piece Two Swallows (1981). Depicting the Southern Chinese traditional architecture of white walls and black tiles in ink lines, the work evokes Piet Mondrian’s geometric abstractions. His later piece Reminiscences of Jiangnan (1996) takes the same region as its subject but constructs a more abstract composition using dots, lines, and planes. Wu later developed a diverse body of oil paintings, such as Slim Weeds (1994), that expressed the beauty of nature. In his later years, he focused on compositions dominated by the colour black, revealing a more condensed artistic world. In Bitter Melon Homestead (1998), informed by the confession, ‘Life has already given me enough bitterness, so the bitterness of bitter melons no longer tastes bitter’, Wu painted white bitter melons on a black background, alluding to his experiences during the Cultural Revolution, when freedom of expression was suppressed. The exhibition also features Nest (2010), one of his final works. Interwoven dots, lines, and planes in black and white form one of the last four paintings he ever created, where the trembling of the lines has a lyrical resonance. The exhibition will be on show until Oct. 19.
