Blossom Out 1986

Wu Guanzhong made Blossom Out with ink and colour on paper. It’s all about the splatters and the solids here, right? The eye jumps around the surface of this painting like a stone skipping across a pond. Notice how Wu uses these confident blots of dense black ink, they appear almost at random. But then there’s a delicate network of fine lines and colourful dots, these are very deliberate, almost playful. Look at the big black shape in the foreground, the way the ink bleeds into the paper, creating this soft, blurry edge. And then right next to it, that sharp, angular line. It's like Wu is showing us all the different ways ink can behave. This push and pull between chaos and control, between the bold and the subtle, that’s what makes this painting so alive. You can see the influence of artists like Joan Miró, who also liked to play with these kinds of biomorphic shapes. But Wu brings his own sensibility, rooted in Chinese tradition, to the conversation.