Wu Pin

Signed.

Original: Colour and Ink on Paper. Size: 120.4 cm. by 56.7 cm. Wallscroll

    Wu Pin (fl. late 16th century), whose familiar name was Wen-chung, was a native of Fu-t'ien, Fukien, but spent most of his life in Nanking. During the Wan-li era (1573-1620) he served as a minor official, though it was his painting and calligraphy that gained him renown.

    His intensely personal artistic vision transformed his subjects, whether landscapes or figures, into compositions of strinking, if not weird, impact. Figure compositions often reveal him straining for originality and decisiveness through sophisticatedly controlled recollections of "primitive," archaic styles with their vigour of naivete. Strong colours, often dissonant, are manipulated with knowing deliberateness that underscores the artist's search to overcome the commonplace, while in landscape compositions trees, mountains, compositional placement are freely moulded and contorted to serve the bizarre and the fantastic. Space itself, which is usually thought of in the West as being merely a homogeneous linear distance defined by two objects, begins to become as much a motif to be manipulated and played with as the arbitrarily contorted mountains one sees in his landscapes. These interests mark Wu Pin as a harbinger of the 17th century, when painters daringly explored the odd, the arbitrary, and the imbalanced in their compositions and brushwork.