WU Zhenggong, or Christopher Wu, is a versatile artist with great paradoxes in his personality.

Although his educational background is brilliant, Wu is an autodidact.

And although he is a native of China, Wu is also a Western thinker distinguished by having a most Platonic mind. He lives in modern society but indulges himself by also living in the ancient world. Although he is known as an artist, he proclaims himself to be utterly far removed from it. He thinks so logically that he is more like an Apollonian scholar than a Dionysian artist.

Child prodigy

Wu was born in1961 in Shanghai. As a child, he showed an unusual artistic talent at a very early age. In 1973, his talent was recognized by the Shanghai Art Museum when three of his paintings were rejected from a student exhibition because the style was believed to be too mature to have been possibly painted by the then 12-year-old boy.

However, he participated in the exhibition every year thereafter until 1978. In the summer of 1978, he won first place in the Shanghai Students Fine Arts Competition. In September, he was admitted to the Department of Stage Design of Shanghai Theatre Academy before finishing high school, only three students were granted such a privilege by the Ministry of Culture that year.

In July 1985, after teaching at the Shanghai School of Arts and Design for one year, Wu moved to California. He exhibited his works at the Wally Findlay Galleries in Beverly Hills. In the summer of 1986, he was approached by David Lester, an art dealer and publisher (whose Serendipity Galleries was the fastest growing art gallery on the US west coast) to sign an exclusive contract to represent and publish his works.

Lester had found that Wu could do virtually anything, from a landscape to a still-life to a portrait, he could paint in either classical or impressionistic style, using oils or watercolours and all this at extraordinary speed.

Wu began a working relationship with the gallery and, as a result, turned down the Foreign Student Scholarship offered by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Wu’s relationship with the gallery ended when they failed to reach agreement on the duration of the contract.

Rare appreciation

In May 1987, Wu made his first trip to the US east coast and showed some photographs of his works to James Cox, the director of the Grand Central Art Galleries on 57th Street in New York. Cox arranged for renowned Chinese painter Chen Danqing to see Wu’s works several days later. It was in Cox’s office that Wu met Chen, the single most famous painter in China in the early 1980s, now a professor of the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University.

Cox told Chen that he was really impressed by Wu’s extraordinary techniques and versatility. “Before that, I only knew China had a Chen Danqing, now I know China has a Christopher Wu,?Cox said. Chen was one of a few artists who could fully appreciate Wu’s talent and the two became friends.

In September 1987, Wu entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the oldest art school in America which was founded in 1805. He won several prizes, including the Carpel Award; the Morris Blackburn Landscape Prize; the Frances D. Bergman Memorial Prize and the Catherine Grant Memorial Prize. Apart from Roswell Weidner, the late senior teacher and President of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Fellowship, Wu was one of only two persons, and the only student in the Academy at that time, to be represented by Newman Galleries, the oldest and largest gallery in Philadelphia. Wu moved to New York after graduation in May 1990.

Wu has been represented by Portraits, Inc in New York since 1995. Founded in 1942, Portraits, Inc is the largest gallery of its kind in the world. Three of his still-life paintings are in the private collection of Marian MacKinney, the owner of the gallery. From May 1998, the Scafa Modernart Group, now a part of The Art Publishing Group, started to publish his posters. One of his images, “French Florist? became one of the best-sellers of 2001.

Looking back on his education and artistic training, Wu admitted that he did not learn much from schools and teachers. “I started my art training by copying. Since nobody can paint as well as those European Old Masters, I just studied their techniques through reproductions in books, and did not follow anybody in China except at the very beginning. I always believe that the best way and the only way to become the best is to learn from the best.? Rooted in the past

Apparently, his paintings are an integration of the styles of various “Old Masters? In fact, the nobility and elegance of his portraits are rooted in Titian, Rubens, Velasquez and Van Dyck, his motifs and interest in still-life are derived from Chardin and Manet, the palette and rendering of his landscapes derive from Corot, Monet and Sisley.

Maybe it is because of something in his blood and maybe because he was born to be a classicist that he does not need to follow these masters closely. “I was utterly stunned when I first saw reproductions of Greek sculptures during high school, and later Winckelmann’s famous comment on the ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur?of Greek art became my creed.?

Maybe it was this first impression that awakened Wu’s innermost ideas.

Wu’s indulgence in the past and his pursuit of classical beauty seems strange nowadays. Somehow he is just like a man who belongs to the 17th century. His Apollonian attitude has made him more like an erudite scholar than an artist. Hence, it would be appropriate to call him “scholar-artist?or “learned artist? “Anachronism??an error in chronology ?is the word he likes to use to describe himself. Indeed, Wu does seem like a person from a former age and in that sense, “Renaissance Man??a person who has wide interests and is expert in several areas ?might be the most appropriate term to describe him.