Who is the greatest artist in modern China? Such a question is impossible to answer, given the subjectivity of art as a whole. However, naming the most financially successful artist is a much more objective task, leaving little room for debate.

The 2010 Hurun Art List, published in March 2010, names China’s top 50 living artists who earned the highest totals at public auctions during 2009. Zhao Wuji, then 89, was ranked first with an annual total of 240 million yuan, followed close behind by 91-year-old Wu Guanzhong, whose work earned 220 million yuan that year. Of Wu’s works, Water Buffalo Under the Willows (1995) sold for 14.56 million yuan to become the most expensive traditional Chinese painting of 2009.

It was no surprise that Wu’s death, on June 25, 2010, prompted widespread mourning in art circles. From July 7 to August 2, an exhibition honoring the painting master attracted over 10,000 university students to visit the National Art Museum of China. According to the museum’s curator, Fan Di’an, the exhibition was the ideal commemoration to help more people understand the man and his work. Additionally, three seminars were held to discuss Wu’s artistic achievements.

Born in 1919, Wu went to France in 1947 to study Western art history at the École Nationale Supérieur des Beaux-arts in Paris. During his three years there, he gained a deep insight into Western art, especially the more modern work. In a memoir Wu penned in his later years, he described his fondness for Van Gogh: “When I began to learn painting as a child, I had already fallen in love with Van Gogh’s work. That love has never diminished to this day.”

Van Gogh once said to his brother, “Perhaps you will argue that there are also flowers in Paris, so you can blossom there, but you’re wheat that should be sowed in the fields of your hometown, where you can take root and grow.” Inspired by these words, Wu returned to China in the autumn of 1950 to teach at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, the Architecture Department of Tsinghua University, and other prestigious institutions. Gradually, he emerged as one of China’s most renowned painters of the twentieth century.

Wu devoted his life to combining Chinese ink painting with Western oil painting, which resulted in an injection of eternal vitality into all of his art. Typically, Chinese ink painting features brush and ink as its primary tools, and images are rendered in white and black. But Wu explored a more colorful world in his lifelong practice of traditional Chinese painting. With skillful use of black and white, his work usually inspires transcendent interpretations. Meanwhile, the style of his work wanders down the path connecting realism to the semi-abstract. For a long time, Wu had been continually exploring the languages and aesthetics of both Eastern and Western art while practicing the concepts of “introducing ethnic elements into oil painting” and “modernizing traditional Chinese painting,” to develop his own unparalleled artistic style. Since the 1980s, his artistic conceptions have drawn worldwide attention, and played an active role in the evolution of modern Chinese painting theory.