Wang Lan's First Love-Painting

Even as a child in his native Hopei, Wang Lan would take his paintbox with him to the Chinese opera. While other children gaped goggle-eyed at the stuntsmanship and the grownups calmly sipped tea amidst the cacophony, Wang Lan would attempt to capture the performance in watercolors--its sweep and flourish, the whirling, tumbling, and stately strides.

Of course, his budding talents found application in other kinds of painting as well. There were streetscapes and pastorales and delicate mountain scenes. The recurring theme of the Chinese opera, with its vigor and feeling straining through its meticulous and elaborate forms, however, was present in his work from the first. And this tension of form and content continued to infuse his painting throughout.

But early in his career, before he had even completed two years at Peiping's Chen Wah Fine Arts Academy, war-torn China forced upon the 17-year-old artist a press of emotions too intense, too encompassing to express on the pages of a sketchbook. With the Japanese invasion, Wang Lan felt himself driven to adopt a more epochal, more universal form. Only the written word could express the feelings he experienced as a freedom fighter, first against the invaders and later against the Communists. Only in fiction could he begin to convey the human cost of his country's 20-year agony.

His best-known novel, the 1958 epic Blue and Black, won worldwide fame through its many translations. Its screen and stage adaptations have been acclaimed at home and abroad. His position as one of China's senior men of letters is attested to by his Executive Directorship of the Chinese Center, International P.E.N. (an international association of writers).

It was in Taiwan, however, that Wang Lan at last found the peace he needed to return to painting, his first love. The island's physical beauty and the traditional Chinese arts and culture so carefully preserved there supplied him with the inspiration he needed to take up his brush again. In his new home, Wang Lan found again the dash and drama of the opera stage that so enthralled him as a child.

And like a child he painted--with all the vibrancy of color and boldness of line that one would expect from a fresh new talent. But now, underlying the exuberance of his vision is a mature control that allows the artist to seize upon "only that which assumes form and is significantly beautiful," to use the words of the late Chinese scholar Dr. Lin Yu-tang.

Dr. Lin, in a tribute to his P.E.N. Club colleague, goes on to hail Wang Lan as an artist who is at the same time truly modern and truly Chinese. In his Chinese opera painting, as in his landscapes, Wang Lan relies on suggestion rather than minute detail to convey the impact of the traditional theatrical forms. This is what Dr. Lin calls "the art of sublimation, which makes important use of what is not there..."

These paintings are not the Audubonesque album leaves one so often finds associated with Chinese opera subjects, the meticulously expressed documentations more appropriate to exotic fauna than to the depiction of a living and vital art form. Wang Lan's Chinese opera scenes--indeed all his paintings--are "snatched from nature," to use Dr. Lin's phrase. They have "the total effect of something perfect...a combination of color, line, and atmosphere resulting in what we must call inevitability...once seen, they cannot be forgotten."

That Dr. Lin's assessment is shared by other critics and art lovers is attested to by the inclusion of Wang Lan's work in such distinguished collections as the David Rockefeller collection and the permanent collection of the National Historical Museum of China. Wang Lan serves as Chairman of the Chinese Watercolor Society and executive director of the Chinese Writers' and Artists' Association. Foreign watercolor societies in Hawaii and Great Britain also include him in their rolls.

But despite his many honors, Wang Lan is by no means prepared to rest upon his laurels. He recalls the day in 1960 that he took up his watercolors again: "When I started painting I couldn't stop. I painted until midnight. . ." And he hasn't stopped since. His travels throughout Europe, Asia, and America have yielded a wealth of watercolor vignettes. But it's always to the Republic of China and to Chinese opera that he returns.