Lot Essay
Wu Biduan was born in Shanghai. He started to learn to paint at the age of twelve and spent a tough childhood working as a newsboy, a copy clerk at the Office of the Eight Route Army, as a student at Yucai School and in the Department of Fine Arts at the United University of Northern China. After graduation in 1949, he went to Tianjin with the People's Liberation Army and was assigned to work in the Department of Culture and Education of the Military Control Commission of Tianjin. He started teaching in the Art Department of the newly formed Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1950, and in the following years he worked as a War Correspondent on the Korean front, studied in the Department of Engraving at the Repin Academy of Fine Arts in Leningrad and had his first one-man show in the former U.S.S.R.. After returning to China in 1959, he travelled extensively throughout China, making sketches, collecting source materials, creating new art works, and participating in many prestigious art exhibition in China, Hong Kong and England. In 1979 he was elected member of the Chinese Artists' Association, and a year later of the Chinese Printmakers' Association. He visited the United States in 1984, Austria and Finland in 1986, and Paris and London in 1987. Belgium was the next on the list, where he lectured and worked at the famous Masereel Engraving Studio. Over the years, he has also produced many illustrations, sketches and portraits for publications such as Lu Xun's novels The story of Ah Q and Disturbance, Soap, and The Cat and The Rabit, the portrait of Premier Zhou Enlai, and novels by Serafimovich and Furmanov. Wu Biduan has created a completely unique style in painting, water colours, composite plate carvings, woodcuts and lithographs, by combining traditional Chinese techniques with those of Western art.