Breaking, Establishing, and Practicing: Exploring the National Flavor in Wu Guanzhong’s Art Through Where Does the Soul Reside

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_29How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Wu Guanzhong; artistic nationalization; breaking-establishing-practicing; artistic conception; true emotion; a kite never far from its string

Abstract

At the end of the 20th century, the field of Chinese art faced a dual dilemma: the rigidity of traditional ink painting conventions and the failure of Western oil painting’s localization. The criteria for defining artistic nationality and its realization paths became core academic issues. In his work Where Does the Soul Reside: Random Thoughts on National Flavor in Art, Wu Guanzhong proposed a central question: When creative materials and techniques are no longer exclusive, how should the national characteristics of art be defined and manifested? Based on this, this paper innovatively adopts a logical framework of breaking, establishing, and practicing to systematically analyze Wu Guanzhong’s complete theoretical system of artistic nationalization. Breaking aims to eliminate three cognitive fallacies—theme determinism, material determinism and cultural isolationism to clear ideological obstacles in the process of nationalization. Establishing focuses on setting two core principles: artistic conception as the soul and true emotion as the root, anchoring the spiritual core of nationalization. Practicing realizes the connection between theory and practice through the creative methodology of “a kite never far from its string.” Taking Where Does the Soul Reside as the core text, this paper combines Wu Guanzhong’s academic discussions and creative practices to deeply analyze the internal logical connections of his breaking-establishing-practicing system, revealing the essential abode of national flavor in art. It provides a new academic perspective and reference paradigm for theoretical research and practical exploration of contemporary artistic nationalization.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Kexin Sun
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/15
TI  - Breaking, Establishing, and Practicing: Exploring the National Flavor in Wu Guanzhong’s Art Through Where Does the Soul Reside
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities and Arts (SSHA 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 283
EP  - 295
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_29
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_29
ID  - Sun2026
ER  -