A pioneering figure of Chinese modernist painting, Wu was a prolific artist, a vocal theoretician, ​and an influential teacher during the 1940s. As a student, he had been part of a generation of young artists and patriotic intellectuals with deep roots in Chinese cultural traditions. But, after studying in Europe in the 1920s, he returned to China eager to develop Chinese art and culture via Western modernism. From the 1940s until his death in 1988, Wu committed himself to explore abstract painting, which made him both a unique art-historical case in China and an extremely marginalized figure: during his lifetime, he never had a solo exhibition and rarely published his works or writings.