Cui Ruzhuo

Biography

In 1957 an exhibition of Qi Baishi’s late works opened at the Palace Museum, known as Gugong, in Beijing. Among the visitors was thirteen-year-old Cui Ruzhuo, who by his own account was overwhelmed by what he saw. Even then he went to the palace to copy old masters.

He was born in Beijing in 1944, into a family in which, as is generally believed, his grandfather had served as a general under the Qing dynasty. His father made him copy out passages from the Analects and the Five Classics by hand; this, it seems, is what led the boy to calligraphy. From early childhood he studied with the calligrapher Zheng Songxian (1892–1976). At seventeen he entered the secondary school attached to the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts and graduated in 1964. Among his teachers was Li Kuchan, himself a pupil of Qi Baishi; under his guidance Cui also worked on large-scale flower-and-bird painting. The sources give different dates for the start of these studies. After school Cui taught at the Central Academy of Arts and Design. In 1978 he was included in a creative group under the Ministry of Culture, later to become the Research Institute of Chinese Guohua Painting. The group worked at the Summer Palace (Yiheyuan), alongside Li Kuchan, Huang Zhou, Guan Shanyue, Ya Ming and Cheng Shifa.

In 1981 he left for the United States. At the invitation of the Chinese Art Research Association of New York he gave a lecture at Lincoln Center on modern Chinese ink painting. In 1982 he took part in the New York international art biennial, where he was the only Chinese artist; his work “Autumn Rhymes” received a special award from the jury. That same year he became a visiting professor at Dewey University in New York and vice-president of the same association. His works were bought by private collectors and museums; Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger and Soong Mei-ling are named among the owners. In 1988, at the first International Ink Painting Exhibition in Beijing, he received an encouragement award for the work “Dream of Mountains”, and in 1989 his paintings were shown at the National Museum of History in Taipei.

In 1996 Cui returned to China and settled in Beijing. Later he supervised doctoral students at the Chinese National Academy of Arts. In 2004 he was named among the ten most talented artists in China, and in 2006 his scroll “Ode to Peace” was chosen to fly aboard the spacecraft Shenzhou 6. In 2011, at the invitation of the Great Hall of the People, he painted in twenty days a panel of flowers and birds about eighteen metres long. In 2013 museums bearing his name opened, among them, it is said, one in Shizuoka, Japan; in 2016 his exhibitions were held in Russia, including in Saint Petersburg.

From the 1980s he collected painting and calligraphy, from masters of the Song dynasty to his own contemporaries. After the Cultural Revolution, old works went for next to nothing into private hands or abroad, and Cui bought them back at auctions and sales in China, and from émigrés as well. Today his collection is considered one of the largest private collections of traditional Chinese art.

To my mind, this experience shows in his own paintings: he works in a traditional manner, without literally imitating the old masters.