WU SCHOOL

Pinyin Wu, group of Chinese painters of the Ming dynasty active in the second half of the 15th and first half of the 16th centuries. They were scholar-artists who, in their literati painting (/a>wen-jen-hua ), perpetuated the personally expressive styles and attitudes of former artists such as the Four Masters of the Yan dynasty (q.v.) in contrast to their contemporaries of the Che school (q.v.), who perpetuated more conservative styles. The Wu school was named after Wu county (hsien) in the region of Soochow (Su-chou), in Kiangsu Province, where the painters worked. Among the artists included in the group are Shen Chou and his student Wen Cheng-ming (qq.v.). Generally, their paintings are quite subtle, but that subtlety veils great variety and imaginationwith a sure, light brush to define painterly and structural complexity, learned allusions and poetic inscriptions, and very thin, delicate colouring. Their paintings were done more for their own and their peers' intellectual amusement than for a larger public. Some well-known painters, such as T'ang Yin (q.v.) and Ch'in Ying, lived in the area and knew the famous members of the Wu school but cannot easily be grouped with them because of their sometimes differing styles and interests.