Shanghai exhibition paints picture of change

In 1946, Wu won a government scholarship to study art at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts. He was fascinated by what he saw in France, and took a great interest in European modern art. Wu returned to China in 1950 and began to teach at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, before moving to Tsinghua University and later to the Central Institute of Arts and Crafts in Beijing.

Throughout his artistic career, Wu constantly searched for authentic Chinese expressions in oil painting.

"Between the 1950s and '70s, he tried to incorporate Chinese aesthetics in oil painting, creating many rural life scenes," Xiang says. "This laid a solid foundation for the arrival of his mature phase, when he developed an ingenious approach to lines, planes, and dots in landscape paintings, achieving a synthesis of Western elements with traditional Chinese painting."

Standing at the crossroads between China and the West, inheritance and innovation, tradition and modernity, both artists chose to combine Chinese philosophy and aesthetics with the techniques developed by Western art, and facilitated the modernization of traditional Chinese ink painting, and the localization of oil painting, Xiang adds.

They incorporated lively folk art and contemporary elements into literati-dominated traditional Chinese painting, breaking its monolithic and rigid standards.