Now in Seoul, Wu Guanzhong's landscapes dance between East and West

To Wu Guanzhong (1919-2010), painting was like flying a kite — a soaring act of freedom, yet always tethered to the ground. The image could drift high into abstraction, but it must never lose its thread to life below. “If the painting completely breaks the connection between human feeling and the object portrayed,” he once said, “the kite string has been broken. I try to keep the line unbroken.” One of the most towering figures in 20th-century Chinese art, Wu devoted his career to bridging Eastern ink traditions and Western modern abstraction. His works hover between the tangible and the transcendent, drifting, like a kite, on the wind of two worlds. Now, 17 of his masterpieces, all from the Hong Kong Museum of Art’s (HKMoA) collection, have landed at the Seoul Calligraphy Art Museum for his first exhibition in Korea. Aptly titled “Between Black & White,” the show traverses his oeuvre through an achromatic spectrum of silvery gray, white and black. Vigorous yet restrained, his paintings are proof that the convergence of Eastern and Western aesthetics does not need to be aWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times