Wu Guanzhong 吳冠中 China, 1919-2010

Wu Guanzhong - Artist, Author, Academic

Wu Guanzhong is probably the most distinguished living Chinese artist; his work appreciated and collected around the world.

He was born in 1919 into a poor farmer’s family in Yixing County, Jiangsu Province, China. 

In 1936 he enrolled at the National Arts Academy in Hangzhou, graduating in 1942. In 1947 he went to France on a government scholarship to study at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. 

He returned to China in 1950 to teach, initially at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing, and subsequently at the Architecture Department of Qinghua University, the Beijing Fine Arts College, and the Central Academy of Fine Arts and Crafts. 

He is currently Professor of the Fine Art Institute of Qinghua University, Beijing.

For over half a century Wu Guanzhong has worked hard to create a large body of highly distinctive and personal work, successfully fusing Chinese and Western art, traditional and modern spirit.

Wu Guanzhong has held solo exhibitions at the Beijing China Fine Art Museum, the Singapore National Museum Art Gallery, the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, the Spencer Museum of Art in X, the Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art in X, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Musee Cernuschi in Paris, the Taipei National Museum of History, and the Hong Kong Museum of Art.

In 1991 he was made Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of France, and in 1993 received a gold medal from the Paris municipal government. In 2003 he was awarded the Medaille des Arts et Lettres by the Academie des Beaux Arts de l’Institut de France, the first Chinese artist to be so honoured.

Over sixty books about the artist and his work have been published, and more than thirty collections of essays.