Lilac

Wu Guanzhong was an artist from the second generation of Chinese to study in France, devoting himself throughout his entire life to exploring both oil painting with Chinese characteristics and the modernization of ink painting. Lilac, a work from the pinnacle of Wu Guanzhong’s career, dates from the year he was made officer of the French Ministry of Culture’s Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Wu Guanzhong made very few floral still lifes in his life. In 1991, he had stopped painting due to immense sorrow at his wife’s hospitalization for cerebral thrombosis, but Wu Guanzhong’s creative desire was rekindled once he saw his wife’s early painting studies of lilac flowers. Lilac flowers represent sorrow, first love and romance, and the artist expresses forty-five years of deep feelings between husband and wife through this painting.