WU GUANZHONG’S ARTISTIC LEGACY: IDEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS AND ARTISTIC PRACTICES

The prevalent interpretations regarding the creative transformations of the artistic heritage of an outstanding 20 th -century Chinese artist, Wu Guanzhong, often focus on external political, ideological, and everyday factors.The article aims to investigate the internal motivations behind his artistic development.It is grounded in Wu Guanzhong's ethical framework, as he adopted the character (tu, meaning bitter) as his pen name, thereby associating his principles with those of the Chinese writer, translator, and patriot, Lu Xun, as well as his brother, Russian proletarian writer Maxim Gorky.The aesthetic and theoretical contemplation of Wu Guanzhong's ethical framework was encapsulated in his theory of abstraction, described as unbroken kite string, which posits a novel understanding of beauty as the outcome of abstracting artistic form from the objects of the external world, reflecting the artist's unique emotional response to a reality beyond themself.