Wu HuaFeng
Thursday, 27 August 2009
When I was young, I practiced painting. It was a natural extension from Chinese calligraphy. I remember being fascinated with beautifully “watery” paintings of landscapes, wildlife and buildings produced by ancient Chinese masters, and I certainly tried very hard to mimic the natural flow of brush strokes common in many Chinese paintings, but often with mixed results. It was very easy to convey movement in a picture if one had good control of the brush. It did not help that the watercolour paints were, more often than not, diluted excessively to achieve that soft, faint “watery” look. So, of course, when I came across Wu HuaFeng’s works, I was somewhat taken aback. They allude to ancient China, yet are done with thick oil paints and very short, harsh strokes, ultimately imparting a rather European aesthetic to otherwise distinctly oriental structures…