Road to Mastery

Over thousands of years, traditional Chinese sculpture has developed a freehand style and unique aesthetics different from Western realistic sculpture. In 2002, Wu Weishan first put forward the concept of freehand sculpture. courtesy of the author

Iwas born into a family of intellectuals in Shiyan Town of northern Jiangsu Province. Influenced by my father, I became obsessed with illustrations in old books and paintings on porcelain in my family’s collection by the age of five. Elegant landscape and female figure paintings were especially seared into my brain. At 11, I started to sketch various seniors I saw on the street.

In 1979, I enrolled in Wuxi Institute of Arts and Technology to study clay sculpture. It was the first time I saw so many statues in my life: Venus, Busts of Michelangelo, Voltaire, the Head of Alexander the Great… Huishan clay, a raw material used to create figurines, was piled in a small courtyard outside the studio. This black clay is oily and soft. With a history of about 400 years, Huishan clay figurines made in Wuxi are one of the well-known folk crafts in China. The white plaster used to craft Western statues and black Huishan clay sharply contrast each other. I saw my destiny somewhere between the two sculpting materials.

My first class at the institute was a sketching course taught by Wu Kaicheng, a renowned Chinese painter. His concise but inspiring instructions as well as his proficient painting skills impressed me immediately. It was like bathing in the warm light of art. Mr. Wu stressed that an artist should depict real feelings about subjects rather than staying confined to any “certain patterns.”

A research trip to Suzhou with my class in the spring of 1980 remains fresh in my memory. In Suzhou, we visited two ancient painted sculptures in the city’s Dongshan Town to copy them. One was the painted