PROVENANCE:

Ancient collection of Song Zhong, former Secretary General of the Chinese Olympic Committee (a gift from the artist)
Private collection, Singapore

"Viewing Fish at Flower Harbor", is one of the ten views at the West Lake, a famous scenic area in China. This view is to the southwest of Su Causeway. Emperor Kangxi arrived at the West Lake in 1699, and he was so taken by what he saw that he wrote an epigraph with the title "Viewing Fish at Flower Harbor." A stele with the epigraph was erected by the side of the fishpond. Later when Emperor Qianlong traveled around Jiangnan (the area to the south of the lower reaches of the Changjiang River), he also visited the West Lake, also moved to compose verses, he had them engraved as an epigraph on the back of Kangxi's stele. One of them is "At the Flower Harbor under the Mountain of flowers, flowers touch fish, and fish kiss flowers."

Memories of Jiangnan have always been an important theme of many of Wu's paintings. This painting is a typical one from his "Jiangnan" series. The picture's poetic atmosphere is exuberant, with dots, lines, and planes precisely combined and mixed. The waves are depicted in freehand brushwork, and a close up of swimming carp is inserted. The complete scene is wisely balanced in terms of distant views and close shots, solid objects and empty spaces, and is cleanly coordinated in respect of colors and composition. Wu Guanzhong himself commented that "Brushes, rice paper or silk, Chinese painting pigment, all these materials have their respective virtue, and limitations as well. It is difficult to cover a huge area of canvas or paper with such materials only. For a long time I've been exploring a way to form a daedal effect of composition by applying several limited elements, such as dots, lines, planes, and various colors such as black, white, gray, red, yellow, green, etc. so that the painting area is expanded, showing spacious effect by balancing and changing the density of dots and lines." (Refer to Reason–Wu Guanzhong Talks about Art by Wu Guanzhong)