On Wu Guanzhong's Painting Aesthetic Thought

Wu Guanzhong is a famous contemporary painter, art educationist and prose writer in Modern China. He accounts for a special significant figure in Chinese painting history since the 1980's. Not only does this particularity present itself in his personal painting style, but also the consciousness of artistic thoughts in practice. His thoughts have guided theoretic criticism for many years, and greatly influenced the course of contemporary painting after the 1980s as well as reflected the fusion in art creation in the 20th century and the new turning era.The Introduction part introduces the theoretical research on Wu Guanzhong in current academia, and then the methods and the significance of this dissertation are proposed. The Chapter I mainly introduces his artistic experience and ideological background. The Chapter I consisting of two parts. The first part discussed the three importance choices in the artistic life of Wu Guanzhong in sequence, and gives prominence to his thoughts of life on the basis of loyalty. As the ideological background, the second part analyzed the formation and painting thought characteristics of Lin/Wu system that it stressed combining Chinese and western arts in the 20th century.As the key part of this dissertation, the second chapter studies the aesthetic thoughts of Wu Guanzhong from four aspects below: affinity to the people, the formal beauty , the poetic imagery beauty and the painting style. It consists of four parts. In the first part, emphasizing affinity to the people is a requirement of politics on art of Wu Guanzhong's age. He refers to the relation between the art and the people asa-kite-of-unbroken-line. This reflects profoundly aesthetic acceptance--emphasizing painters should serve for people in fiinctionalism, and acceptance from unbroken-line to the edge of the broken-line in ontology. The second part analyzed the formal beauty. Formal beauty is Wu Guanzhong's basic artistic characteristics of his paintings. Wu Guanzhong talked about the legitimacy of the formal beauty in the foothold of tradition and modern, China and west, when most of people could not understand it. In practice, he has expounded the exclusive discovery methods and expressive approaches of formal beauty. This shows how difficult the exploration is on the language between Chinese and western artistic expression. The third part points out that the poetic imagery beauty is the core of Wu Guanzhong's paintings. For this question, he brings forward a viewpoint of "ink and writing brush equal zero". He deserted the theory of "ink and writing brush being the centre" at the art medial level, and thus reestablished the theory that "poetic imagery beauty is the core "at the painting ontology, and he opposed innovative formulism and emphasized innovative spirit. The fourth part analyzed the evolution course of his painting style from the aspects of the concrete-image, the semi-abstract-image and the abstract-image, of these his unique abstract-image painting style is emphasized.The third chapter pointed out the significance of the aesthetic thoughts of Wu Guanzhong. This chapter contains two parts. The first part emphasized that the writers should adhere to the tradition and innovation on the historicity and modernity through the end of formulation by Wu Guanzhong. According to Wu Guanzhong's viewpoint of all arts inclining to poetry, the second part proposed the artistic thinking .