Wu Dayu

Wu Dayu (1903, 1988) was a pioneering Chinese modernist painter who studied in France during the 1920s and became one of the earliest Chinese artists to embrace Western abstraction and oil painting. He was a founding faculty member of the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou and profoundly influenced generations of Chinese artists, including Zao Wou-Ki and Chu Teh-Chun. Despite decades of political suppression during which he was forced to stop exhibiting, his lyrical abstract compositions gained significant international recognition posthumously through major auction sales.