A mountain need not be high; It is famous so long as there is a deity on it.

A mountain need not be high; It is beautiful so long as there are lowers on it;

A mountain need not be high; It is attractive so long as there is scenery.

In the 90s Wu Guanzhong made the most important breakthrough in his art life and reached the peak of his art. That time period of the artist featured abstraction in form and nobleness in spirit. However, having successfully assimilated the techniques of abstraction, the works of Wu Guanzhong in the 90s are both Chinese in outlook and modern in conception.

To find a better expression for his ideal scenery, Wu Guanzhong traveled to Yunnan in the 1970s and stayed there through the 1980s till the 1990s. During the two decades he covered almost the whole country and sketched grand mountains in sight. Just as he himself said he was thoroughly "intoxicated by rivers and mountains and infatuated with customs and traditions. Instead of merely painting and sketching, I expected to get inspiration and cultivate my own style." Like the process of mine selection and refinery, he repeated the efforts of refining and abstracting and inally cultivated the unique abstract form and created his own distinctive art style.

"The Blooming Mountain" is a typical landscape painting of the 90s depicting banquets of flowers blooming on the Blooming Mountain in a suburb of Beijing. Blooming Mountain, especially well-known for its "flowers", is dressed up with peach blossoms in early March and turns into a garden of flowers with the weather getting warmer. "Most lowers cannot be named and rich colors are beyond description". The mountain, like spring all year round, boasts waves of grand peaks and luxuriant lowers with streams trickling and murmuring around the rocks. Ascending the top of the mountain you can catch a sight of the majestic view of sunrise and lofty peaks; descending into the steep valleys you can get a gorgeous spectacle of a waterfall roaring all its way along and splashing itself against the rocks. It is the place where the renowned Buddhist monk DaDian in the Tang Dynasty cultivated himself, as the legend goes. In all his works, objective representation loses its importance, overtaken by the beauty of the abstract forms, lines, colors and subtle ink tones.

In the eyes of the master, everything on earth exists in its own unique shape and changes all the time round. They are mutually related following certain common rules. The masterpiece "The Blooming Mountain" unfolds a legendary natural beauty displaying such elements as "separate form", "chaotic", "dispersion", "concentration" and "cooperation". With a fantasy air and atmosphere of point, line and plane jointly with red, yellow, green and purple, the painting, like a rainbow, beams its brilliant grandeur and elegance and shines the very core of the creation of the artist.

Life can't be without flowers yet there are lives never flowering. It is usually hard to relate a cloudy and bitter life with a lovely lower. There is life which is blooming all the way through yet it is hard to say Yang Kwei- fei, the magniicent concubine, is a blooming flower all the while before MAWEI Slope. Flower blooms simply for fruits. Blooming might be a matter of a second, while fruits might be everlasting. It is everlasting just because it has become the seed like peach blossoms coming out and bearing fruit every year for hundreds and thousands of years. We usually try to comfort ourselves: life is but a short span while art enjoys an everlasting life. The everlasting life of art is the contribution of seed and new branches. Art absent of inspiration and enlightenment is an art bearing no fruit and is doomed to wither after a lash in the pan. (From Beautiful Articles and Books Series by Wu Guanzhong-- Out of Red and Black Ink Come Beautiful Hills and Mountains)

All the shapes, forms and atmosphere richly present in Wu Guanzhong's works are from real life, but different from the habitual in life, the artist selects part of the beauty and has it processed and refined in a creative way to turn it into a spiritual and cultural kind. Granting the sensation of beauty to the painting and communicating the image of beauty to the hearts of viewers, the artist makes unremitting efforts to widen the aesthetic vision of the viewers. He often, breaking through conventional practice, seeks new meaning for space and gets a creative tune in the linear layout of the animal and plant images. Meanwhile, vast patches of cold and warm colors are used to emphasize the brightness of colors and special meanings and at the same time the turning and twisting of branches suggest the strength and vigor of lines. All this can be regarded as a change in form, however, it is, as a matter of fact, an exhibition of his widening bosom and improving aesthetic awareness and a presentation of his ardor embracing a new time and new life as well as his soul-to-soul communication with Mother Nature.

Marveling at the "The Blooming Mountain" will lend you a real feeling of being there and offer you an amazing experience of seeing the lowers blooming and withering, arousing within you the feelings that life is just like the lowers. As Wu Guanzhong said: "A lower is liked and loved simply for its short blooming life. When it withers, it is gone and leaves great pity in the heart of the lookers. Life, like the lower, makes the world interesting and amazing simply because it comes and goes in a leeting way. "