Wu Dayu’s artistic practice is grounded in an intensive exploration of form and color, accompanied by a sustained concern with conception. At first encounter, his paintings may appear to bear the imprint of Western artistic styles; yet closer contemplation reveals the profound resonance of an Eastern sensibility. To engage with his paintings is to encounter an impression, a capture of sensation: they are at once manifestations of Western abstraction and embodiments of Chinese imagery, resisting both the need for external referents and definitive categorization.
Wu Dayu developed the term “shixiang”, a distinctive concept through which the forms of the phenomenal world are absorbed, transformed, and reshaped through the movement of the inner spirit. Rather than reproducing appearances, his painting seeks to distill from them a more fundamental sense of form and movement. This understanding of shixiang corresponds closely to Wu’s broader engagement with abstraction, through which he sought to establish an artistic language that could synthesize Western modernism with the aesthetic and philosophical traditions of Chinese art.
Color in Wu’s work, meanwhile, may be said to attain an exceptional degree of refinement. It functions not merely as a vehicle for lyrical expression or the articulation of personal sentiment, but as a force capable of striking the viewer at the deepest level of perception—like a resonant hammer upon the human heart. Lin Fengmian accordingly praised Wu Dayu as “an extraordinary color painter with magnificent creative power.” This assessment accords with the centrality of color to Wu’s artistic practice: throughout his career, he pursued color not simply as a descriptive element, but as an autonomous and expressive force within painting.
Wu Dayu’s life seems to affirm the observation that “those who have never created experience emptiness, while those who create experience loneliness.” His artistic life, sustained by an uncompromising spirit of creation, may thus be understood as the solitary monologue of a soul devoted to the pursuit of artistic invention.
Volume I — Contents
002 Authentication Leeter by Wu Dayu’s Family
006 Watercolors
007 Exploring the Underlying Structure of Wu Dayu’s Works on Paper through Phenomenology
019 Drawings
085 Oil Pastels · Figures
163 Oil Pastels · Animals
217 Oil Pastels · Floral Still Lifes
291 Oil Pastels · Landscapes
427 Ink and Mixed Media
Volume II — Contents
002 Certificate of Authentication by Wu Dayu’s Family
007 Color Ink and Mixed Media
055 Oil Pastels · Abstractions
381 Colored Pencils · Abstractions
424 Manuscripts
427 Chronology
