Wu Zuoren: A Collector's Guide to Camels and Pandas

Hold one of his camel scrolls at arm's length and the animal reads as a single wet gesture: a grey mass of shoulder and hump, four legs set down like brush handles, a head turned back on a neck that was drawn in one breath. Come closer and the gesture breaks into information. There is the dry, frayed edge where the brush ran out of ink along the flank, the pale belly left as bare paper, the three or four dark accents at hoof and eye that hold the whole animal upright on the sheet. That gap between the far view and the near view is the test of a Wu Zuoren. The imitations tend to look right from across the room and fall apart at reading distance.

This guide walks you through who Wu Zuoren was and why his European training still shows in his ink, how his camels and pandas are constructed stroke by stroke, which features the copyists fail to reproduce, what the market rewards, and what to ask a seller before you commit.

Who Wu Zuoren was

Wu Zuoren (1908 to 1997) belongs to the generation that had to decide what Chinese painting would be after the empire ended. He was born in Suzhou, went to Shanghai as a student, and there attached himself to Xu Beihong, following his teacher into the art department at Central University in Nanjing. Xu's programme was blunt: learn to draw the way the European academies drew, then bring that command of structure back into ink. Wu took the instruction more literally than most of his contemporaries, and it shaped everything that followed.

He spent the first half of the 1930s in Europe, working in the studio of Alfred Bastien at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, painting in oil and drawing from the model daily. He returned to China in the middle of the decade, taught through the war years, and after 1949 settled in Beijing, where he eventually headed the Central Academy of Fine Arts. His wife, Xiao Shufang, was an accomplished painter of flowers and plants, and works by the two of them are occasionally offered as a pair.

For a collector the useful fact is the order of that training: academic oil painter first, ink painter second. It explains what his brush does and what it refuses to do.

Why the Brussels training shows in the ink

Most twentieth-century ink painters learned their animals from earlier paintings. Wu learned his from bodies. The consequence is visible in every good sheet of his: the animal has weight, and the weight is distributed correctly. A camel's hind leg carries the hindquarters; the hump sits over the spine rather than on top of the outline; a panda's forelimb foreshortens as it reaches across the chest.

This is the bone method of the classical six principles arrived at from the opposite direction, through anatomy rather than through copying masters. Wu did not build his animals from a repertoire of learned strokes. He built the structure and then found the fewest strokes that would state it.

Two habits follow from that, and both are useful in attribution.

• He works wet and commits early. Large areas of body go down as loaded washes, edge to edge, with almost no correction. A painting that shows a silhouette drawn first and filled in afterwards is not working the way he worked.
• He reserves the whites. Bellies, muzzles, the light side of a hump and the panda's face are unpainted paper, shaped by the wash around them rather than by white pigment laid on top.

The northwest journeys that gave him the camel

In the early 1940s Wu travelled west, through Gansu and Qinghai, to the Dunhuang caves and into Tibetan and Kazakh grazing country. He came back with sketchbooks of herders, yaks, horses and camels, and the camel stayed with him for the rest of his life.

That expedition was part of a wider movement. The war pushed Chinese artists inland and then westward, and the encounter with the frontier reset a good deal of twentieth-century painting. Li Keran's sketching journeys of the 1950s did the same thing for landscape, and Huang Zhou's donkeys and Xinjiang figures came out of the same frontier decades. If you collect in this area, treat the three of them as one conversation rather than three separate markets.

The camels matter because they are drawn from observation rather than from convention. Wu knew how a Bactrian camel folds its legs to kneel, how the winter coat hangs off the neck in ragged skirts, and how the two humps slump rather than stand when the animal is thin. Copyists know what a camel looks like in a Wu Zuoren painting, which is not the same knowledge.

How a Wu Zuoren camel is built

Watch the sequence in a good example and you can usually reconstruct it.

• The body arrives first, as one or two broad loaded strokes of dilute ink, tilted with the brush held low, so the tone shifts from dense at the spine to almost nothing at the belly.
• The legs are single strokes with a turn in them. Each leg changes direction at the joint within the same stroke, without a lift. Look for the slight swelling of ink where the brush paused at the knee.
• The head and neck are drawn, not filled. This is where the draughtsman shows. The muzzle, the jaw line and the set of the eye are put down with a smaller brush at speed and they are anatomically right.
• The dark accents come last, few and placed: hooves, eye, nostril, the shadowed underside of the jaw. Count them. Wu is economical, and a painting with dark accents scattered everywhere is usually a copy trying to look confident.

Ink quality is part of the signature. His washes sit in the paper with a soft, granular edge rather than a hard tide line, which is what good ink on absorbent unsized paper does. Pale flat grey with a sharp perimeter suggests bottled ink or a print.

The pandas

In his later decades the giant panda became his most reproduced subject, and it is the reason his name is familiar to people who could not identify a single one of his oils. The formula is deceptively simple: black limbs and ears, black eye patches, everything else reserved white paper, usually with a few strokes of bamboo.

Because the formula is simple, it is the most heavily faked part of his output. Three things are worth checking.

• The eye patch is a shape, not a blob. In his hands it has a direction and a soft outer edge, and it sits in correct relation to the skull rather than being centred on the face.
• The black is one application. The limbs are laid in wet and left alone. Reworked, layered, or scrubbed black is a bad sign.
• The animal has a skeleton. The shoulder rises, the spine sags, the weight is on the haunches. Fakes reliably produce a soft toy.

Signatures, seals and inscriptions

Wu signed and sealed in the ordinary way for his generation, usually with a short signature and one or two relief or intaglio seals, sometimes with a dated line. Two cautions apply.

First, the signature is the easiest part of any painting to copy well, so it can only ever confirm a judgement you have already made from the brushwork. Work through the conventions of twentieth-century artist signatures so you know what a normal one looks like, then stop treating it as evidence on its own.

Second, seals on modern Chinese paintings accumulate. Studio seals, collector seals and later additions all sit on the same sheet, and telling them apart is a separate skill; the guide to seals and collector marks covers how to read the stack. A crisp, perfectly registered seal in fresh orange paste on a sheet with sixty years of tone on it deserves suspicion.

What gets faked, and how

Wu Zuoren fakes are not rare; they are the normal condition of the market. The recurring types:

• Straight copies of published works. His camels and pandas are widely reproduced in books, and a copyist with a good plate can get the composition exactly right. Composition alone proves nothing.
• Recombinations. A camel from one painting, an inscription from another, a seal from a third. These often read oddly because the inscription does not describe the picture.
• Prints with added seals. High-resolution reproductions with a hand-stamped seal and sometimes a hand-painted touch. A loupe settles it: printed ink sits on the surface in a regular dot or rosette pattern and does not bleed into the fibre.
• Period-style works by other hands. Studio followers and academy students painted in this idiom for decades. Copying as a practice has deep roots in China, and the tradition of copies and tracing versions is worth understanding before you assume every close imitation was made to deceive.

The market, and what it rewards

Wu's market is concentrated in mainland China, where the buyers are, and it is bifurcated. Ambitious pictures, particularly the northwest figure subjects and the larger oils, sit at one level. Small decorative pandas and single camels, produced steadily and given away liberally in his lifetime, sit far below it and carry the heaviest fake burden.

What lifts a sheet: scale, a dated inscription tied to a documented period, a northwest subject rather than one from the late repertoire, and an ownership history predating the 1990s boom. What suppresses it: a common panda composition, a small format, remounting that has cropped the inscription, and silence about where the picture has been.

Before you buy

• Ask for the provenance in writing. Not a story on the phone. The documents that constitute real provenance are specific, and their absence in this market is meaningful rather than neutral.
• Look at the picture off the wall and out of the frame. Mounting hides trimmed inscriptions, made-up borders and repairs through the image.
• Prefer pictures with a paper trail over pictures with a certificate. Certificates of authenticity for twentieth-century Chinese paintings are issued by a wide range of parties of varying seriousness, and a family authentication is not automatically stronger than a good exhibition record.
• Buy the brushwork you can read. If you cannot see the structure under the wash at reading distance, walk away, whatever the paperwork says.

Common questions

Did Wu Zuoren paint in oil as well as ink?

Yes, and the oils are central rather than incidental. He trained as an academic oil painter in Brussels and painted in oil throughout his life, including portraits and figure subjects from the northwest journeys. The market for the oils is thinner and more institutional than the market for the ink paintings, and they are less often seen outside China. Anyone judging his ink work benefits from looking at the oils first, because the anatomical habits are easier to see there.

Are his pandas his most valuable works?

Generally not. They are his most recognisable and his most numerous, which are different things. The ambitious figure compositions from the northwest years and the larger oils are the works that carry the serious money, while small panda sheets are the entry level of his market and the part most thoroughly infiltrated by fakes. A panda painting can still be a good purchase; it is simply not where the rarity lies.

How can I tell a print from a painting?

Use a loupe at ten times magnification and look at a boundary between a dark area and pale paper. A brushed edge shows ink following individual paper fibres, with the tone thinning irregularly. A print shows a mechanically regular structure, a uniform edge, and often a faint dot pattern. Then tilt the sheet to raking light: brushed ink has a slight variation in sheen where the wash pooled, and a print does not.

Where are his major works held?

The bulk of his important paintings, in oil and in ink, are in Chinese public collections and in family hands, which is one reason the Western market sees mostly small late sheets. When a seller claims an exhibition history, ask for the catalogue reference rather than the claim.

Further reading

• The Chinese hanging scroll format - how these sheets were mounted, and what remounting hides.
• Huang Binhong's five brush and seven ink methods - the ink vocabulary Wu's generation inherited and argued with.
• What a certificate of authenticity should contain - useful before you accept one at face value.

Browse the collection

Kiln and Ink publishes limited-edition archival giclee reproductions of the twentieth-century Chinese ink masters, hand-numbered and issued with a Certificate of Authenticity. Original Wu Zuoren paintings are a subject we write about rather than one we stock, but the same frontier decades and the same ink vocabulary run through much of what we publish. Browse the collection to see what is currently available.