WU YI
PRAGUE SUMMER
28 November 2013 – 5 January 2014

Wu Yi – A Warrior of Art

(extract from the catalogue – published on the occasion of the exhibition in the Václav Špála Gallery)

Wu Yi is a Chinese, and an absolute painter and accomplished professional. Every field of human activity has its movers who further its progress and challenge the rules but have respect for their ancestors. Wu Yi is such an art pioneer, one of the most radical artists in the history of Chinese art: a writer, ink painter, oil painter, ceramics artist. We in the West can learn a lot from him. He is strictly self-disciplined, devoting his mind and body and all his personal life to his only ambition of being a painter and living with art. There is something about him that reminds me of the mighty painter Václav Boštík. Indeed, Wu Yi fell in love with Boštík the first time he saw his paintings.

Wu Yi is extremely gentle, but emphatic. He is friendly and educated. He knows the art of listening and discovering the essence of things. He is gifted with a very rare style of humour, so much loved by us Czechs. His deep feelings live in symbiosis with an analytical mind. And he devotes everything to his art of painting. And has good wishes for everyone! And he is helping!

The painter Wu Yi simply fascinates me. He is a great man, a great painter. Professor of mural and contemporary panting at the CAFA University (Central Academy of Fine Art) in Beijing, where he previously studied.

There are only a few visual artists in the West who are able to paint with ink on paper – a traditional Chinese technique requiring a consonance between thinking and motion. By the same token, only a few Chinese are able to use oil or tempera on canvas – a traditional western technique. Wu Yi has a command of both. His paintings can be inspirational for Czech artists; they are true and gentle.

Wu Yi is an embodiment of an old Chinese Master who is ingeniously changing the history of ink painting. He gives us an image of what a Chinese scholar looked (and looks) like, and we thus have an opportunity to examine what we learned about Chinese scholars, for example, from the Songs of Ancient China and perhaps other sources. They have at home the “four treasures of a scholar’s studio”, including a brush, inkstick, rice paper and inkstone. Since time immemorial, Chinese scholars and men of letters, whose ambition was to attain a position of office and serve the World under Heaven, the ruler and the people, have been training not only the general official skills but also the basics of philosophy, ethics and aesthetics in the never-ending process of self-improvement. This included the learning of artistic skills, such as calligraphy, the art of playing the qin zither, painting, as well as literary art – the four arts of Chinese lyricism. The art of reading, listening and watching also belonged to this. A Chinese scholar should be able to warm people’s hearts with a beautiful picture but also with fine verses or a small piece of prose.

In this book, I hope, you will find evidence that our traditional Czech inspirational concept of how we see ancient China is still alive, not having faded away and not having been blurred with the tangle of motorways and modern cities with their glass skyscrapers designed by western architects and all the hustle and bustle seen in pictures from modern Beijing or Shanghai; you will find evidence that there are still people that keep seeking the ordinary man in the street, whom the Czech writer Karel Čapek also used to seek. It is interesting to note that in fact the genre pursued by my friend Wu Yi has much in common with Karel Čapek and his Letters from abroad. Travel observations are said to be an old Chinese tradition, developed by the 11th century poet Su Dongpo, author of the two lyrical poems in prose entitled Odes to the Red Cliff, as well as by the playwright and novelist Li Yü, an impetuous wanderer from the 17th century, author of the Carnal Prayer Mat, recently brilliantly translated into Czech by Professor Oldřich Král. During their journeys for business or leisure, these scholarly men recorded things that might seem commonplace – how to make soup, how it rained yesterday, or about fragrant bacon. Perhaps to counterpoint this, they often used poetic language, one or two noble words, a figurative expression, a hint. Their perception of the ordinary things and events of life and the ability to elevate them to the level of the eyes and mind is perhaps what makes them so humane. And to be humane is what all of us should aspire to be.

I am glad that following the creative stays in Germany, France and Japan, the Czech Republic is the fourth country that will have the good fortune of meeting with the views of a Master of the world’s oldest living culture.

Zdeněk Sklenář, Curator, Prague, 10 October 2013