Oil on canvas

76 × 86 cm. 29 7/8 × 33 7/8 in.

Signed in Chinese and dated on bottom right; titled, signed in Chinese and dated on the reverse

LITERATURE
1996, Wu Guanzhong – A Selection of 128 Fine Works, L’Atelier Productions Pte. Ltd., Singapore, p. 66-67
2007, The Complete Works of Wu Guanzhong, vol. III, Hunan Art Publishing House, Changsha, p. 124
2011, Watching the Sunrise – The World in Teacher Wu Guanzhong’s 66 Letters, China Architecture and Building Press, Beijing, p. 178
PROVENANCE
18 Apr 1999, Christie’s Taipei Spring Auction, Lot 6
Acquired directly by present important private Asian collector from the above

Breathing in the Sumptuous Scenery of Yulong Mountains
Universal Beauty in the Collected Masterpieces of Wu Guanzhong’s Yulong Mountain Series

Many different standards can be applied when assessing the status of a great artist, but in the modern art history of China, the name "Wu Guanzhong" is synonymous with excellence. Indeed, Wu dedicated his life to a dual artistic path that embraced the "sinification of oil painting" and "modernization of ink painting." In this context, he took the unprecedented step of focusing on beautiful form and abstraction, resulting in the aesthetic synthesis of "watercolours, oil painting and ink art" with "painting, prose and poetry," leading by example and establishing "an artistic bridge that connected Eastern and Western art." In 1991, Wu was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and in 1992 became "the first living artist" invited to hold a solo exhibition at the British Museum, breaking with its traditional focus on ancient cultural artifacts. Eight years later, he was the first Asian artist to be selected as a "Corresponding Member of the Institut de France Académie des Beaux-Arts."

Admiring Yulong, Recreating Snowy Mountain Peaks:
Life-long Affection for a Sacred Mountain

"I traversed a thousand li of rugged mountains to reach Yulong, vowing not to return without seeing its true form. In the early hours of the morning, it suddenly appeared and I seized the moment."
—— Wu Guanzhong

Of the paintings with a snowy mountain theme Wu produced throughout his artistic career, the "snowcapped Yulong Mountains" are perhaps the best known and one of the motifs most beloved by art collectors. Moreover, the bond between Wu Guanzhong and the Yulong Mountains lasted more than half a century and from 1978 he depicted several scenes in ink, gouache and oils. Indeed, as late as 2003 he was still producing expansive works on the same subject matter.

The emotional connection between the artist and the snowcapped Yulong Mountains can be traced back to a postcard Wu saw in the 1930s. At that time, he was a student at National Hangzhou Academy of Art and after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, in 1938 students and teachers relocated from Kunming to Sichuan. At that time, fellow student and friend, art historian Li Lincan used this opportunity to visit the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau and painted from the nature sending a postcard to Wu on which he sketched the Yulong Mountains in fountain pen. It was this postcard that filled Wu Guanzhong with a profound longing to visit the sacred mountain. However, life can be unpredictable and Wu was not able to visit until four decades later, only making the journey in 1978. In the intervening period, the artist studied overseas and after returning to China was purged and experienced the travails of the Cultural Revolution, but his passion for art never wavered and his desire to seek out this natural wonder remained undiminished: "The sketch of Yulong Mountains Li Lincan included in his postcard caused me to yearn for the mountains for decades. In 1978, I finally reached the Yulong Mountains."

Outstanding Work: Yulong Journey and Large Oil Painting Masterpiece

The headline work for the Spring auction is The Yulong Mountains Snowcapped. This piece was painted by Wu Guanzhong during a trip to Yunnan in 1978, but it is also a testament to the artist’s 40 years of artistic creation and unwavering passion, as well as a glorious example of his snowcapped mountain motif paintings. When visiting the Yulong Mountains that year, Wu painted four oil paintings and four ink paintings of which The Yulong Mountains Snowcapped is the largest oil painting. This piece brings together the three defining elements of the series: snowy mountains, ancient trees and old towns. Its exquisite composition makes it a masterpiece. The second largest of these works, Jungle at the Foot of the Yulong Mountains is part of the National Museum of Singapore collection, an indication of the rarity and value of the auctioned piece. Indeed, The Yulong Mountains Snowcapped is included in the artist’s authoritative oeuvre and was also one of the 128 paintings selected by the Wu himself to appear in Wu Guanzhong – A Selection of 128 Fine Works published by Singapore Art Studio in 1996. The painting was purchased by an important private Asian collector three years later and remained part of that collection for 25 years. As such, its recent appearance on the market will surely appeal to art lovers with a discerning eye.

The Amazingly Layered Snowy Mountains of Lijiang,
Noble Aspiration: Spring Sun on Snow Like a Leaping Dragon

Yulong Snow Mountain, north of Lijiang City in Yunnan Province, is renowned for its unique "spring sun on snow" scenery. From the river valley at the foot of the mountain to the peak, visitors experience the vertical wonder of a full year of seasonal changes and the particularly rare accumulation of snow on the mountain top which is present all year round, while further down the mountain are springtime natural landscapes. Under an azure sky, the snowy mountain stretches exquisitely into the distance, like a dancing silver jade dragon, as the name suggests, in a place considered by the Southwestern Naxi minority people to be a "sacred and heavenly mountain" that is believed to protect the people.

Naturally, the "year-round heaven-bound frost and snow" did not escape Wu Guanzhong. However, he adopted an approach that differed from traditional ink art presentations of the high mountains as towering and awe-inspiring. As such, in The Yulong Mountains Snowcapped the artist boldly adopts a horizontal composition in which near objects are large and distant objects small. In this way he selects the ancient trees in the foreground as his visual starting point, highlighting their towering majesty as they reach up into the clouds, while ingeniously ensuring the central perspective of the scene falls on the eternal snowy mountains, creating a remote and lofty depth and distance. If we compare this work to the layers of ever higher mountains decorated with different trees in Travelers in Snowy Mountains by Southern Song Dynasty painter Liang Kai (born in 1150), Wu sought to break with the approach of the past, by combining the depth and distance of landscape painting with contemporary western perspective ideas, thereby establishing a powerful contrast between near and far, dynamic and static, lines and blocks, which work together to imbue the painting with a strong sense of spatial depth.

The central scene in the painting is Yulong Snow Mountain which is more than 5,000 meters above sea level. The main peak at the center resembles the raised head of a dragon infused with noble aspiration and daring, the connected mountain peaks at its rear, appearing like the scale sections on the dragon’s spine extending without end and bringing to life a silver dragon dancing in the air. The closer part of the painting is a tall cedar forest with tree trunks like cast iron, vigorously growing, as if soaring upwards which together with the horizontal meandering mountain ridge forms an unsurpassably wonderful interplay of vertical and horizontal lines. Wu Guanzhong depicts the mountain top in white, and incrementally infuses it layers of grey tones, while revealing a tiny part of the original background colour of the canvas between the coloured mountain tops. This creates warm sunshine and a scene bathed in serene holy light that showcases a range of dichotomous relationships: light and dark, yin and yang, light and shade, front and back, exchange and overlapping, acceptance and rejection. With just a few strokes, the artist creates a visual feel where "less is more," presenting the ethereal nature and atmosphere of Yulong Snow Mountain to viewers in all its glory.

Tall Cedar Trees, Accompany Me to the World’s End

"I love old trees, not because I treasure their age but honestly because I love the beauty of their old and hardy image."
——Wu Guanzhong

Although Yulong Mountain is the theme of the painting, the trees are important vehicles in their own right and cannot be ignored. Throughout his artistic career, Wu Guanzhong made a point of using trees to not only denote the evergreen nature of life but also as a key indicator highlighting the beauty of his artistic images.

In The Yulong Mountains Snowcapped, Wu Guanzhong places the Himalayan hemlock forest in front of the mountains in the foreground. A total of 10 trees stand in a straight line, with young and old trees intertwined and growing together, employing scattered and varied shapes to showcase the beautiful coexistence of hardness and softness. Through its strong and towering trees or beautiful branches this work alludes to the words of Qing Dynasty master painter Shi Tao (1642-1707) "Like a hero dancing with undulating pitch," while also echoing a commentary by Wu in Formal Beauty of Paintings written the following year in which he said: "Beauty is to be found row upon row, uneven and jumbled." The texture between the leaves is a combination of rapid strokes and scraper, densely and richly arranging yellow-green, ink green, olive green, dark brown and ocher of different depths, all ordered and intertwined. Moreover, the horizontal lines of the tree trunks are also incredibly fluid and completed all at once, imbuing the painting with a sense of rising power. Wu deliberately leaves the central position in the work to two small trees awaiting new crown leaves, which from their squatting position gaze up at the peak of Yulong Mountain. The tall trees on either side are akin to a poetic curtain created by the artist, swaying in the strong wind and slowly opening up the forest to the audience, inviting them to directly explore the holy snow-capped mountain in the distance.

Abstract Brushwork of a Cultural Ancient Town

"Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music."
——German playwright and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The work is equally exquisite in the forest below the mountain ridgeline, where Wu adopts an approach that approximates to Western abstract expressionism, and among which he scatters the buildings of the ancient town of Lijiang. The roof tiles of the town buildings reflect the brick and tile features of the homes of the Naxi people and the artist brings the scene to life with coffee-brown and bright green colours. Hints of the abstract forms employed by Wu Guanzhong from the 1980s onwards are already evident in this work. Indeed, his realistic depiction of building eaves in Lijiang Town at the Foot of the Yulong Mountains from the same series, is simplified in this piece and detached as spontaneous colourful stippling, as if representing a melodic rhythm. Moreover, by adding the dynamic beauty of people living by the dense swaying trees Wu speaks to the harmonious coexistence of mankind and nature.

Natural Beauty between Movement and Stillness
Mental Landscape Combining Ink and Oil painting

When Wu Guanzhong developed the beauty of form and abstraction as well as the "combination of ink and oil painting" in the 1970s, he used thick texture and imbued his oil pigments with a dash of ink smoothness, thereby infusing this snowy ridge sacred mountain, under a boundless clear sky, with an ethereal ice soul beauty. If we look closely at the attention to detail, the accumulation of colour and form in the textured layers of oil colours creates changes in light and shade for the snowy mountain similar to that seen in Claude Monet’s Haystacks (Effect of Snow and Sun), crafting a beautiful static atmosphere. Between the trees, brushstrokes reminiscent of the wrinkle method employed in Chinese painting and calligraphy precisely create leaf crowns. It is also easy to find modern-like brushwork associated with the beautiful vigorous curled branches in Snowy Landscape by Northern Song Dynasty master painter Guo Xi (1020-1090). Between the stillness and the movement of the trees and the mountains Wu employs creative brushwork that blends Eastern and Western technique, ensuring the spirit inherent in the perennially snowcapped-mountain and the character etched into the ancient trees over boundless time perfectly complement each other.

Aloof from the World: an Eternal Art Dream

Although many refined scholars have felt an indissoluble bond to the Yulong Mountains from ancient times to the present, Wu Guanzhong used his paint brush to create wonderful landscapes imbued with great atmosphere, divinity, gazing up at nature and Earth in which he finds a place for himself. The ancient trees, old town and snowy mountains complement each other, creating a microcosm of Yulong Mountains and Lijiang Town in the minds of people around the world. In addition, the pure white and dreamlike sacred mountain elucidates an "eternal dream" that calmly, sincerely and

Price estimate:
HKD: 15,000,000 – 25,000,000
USD: 1,915,700 - 3,192,800

Auction Result:
HKD: --