Tashilhunpo Monastery

Description

This is one of Wu Guanzhong's early oil paintings. Tibet was one of the places which influenced his creative approach. In 1961, Wu Guanzhong joined the China Artists Association's five-month sketching tour in Tibet. It was a long and treacherous journey, and the alpine climate posed physical challenges. Yet, the painter was overjoyed as if he had won the lottery. While travelling by car, they passed by a particularly charming location that created a refreshing and unusual picturesque scene. He decided to take his painter's box there to do sketching at dawn the next day. However, even walking for more than four hours, he failed to find the scene he saw yesterday. He made comparisons repeatedly and came to realise that space was distorted by speed. When snow-capped mountains, plunging falls, towering trees and wild flowers in different orientations and locations were moved by speed, they conjured up extraordinary sights. That experience motivated him to start doing collage in painting, adding innovation to compositions by radically adjusting the distance as well as displacing objects. He called this creative approach "move-the-site sketching". Tashilhunpo Monastery is one such example that features this technique.

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