Ku Yüan
Ku Yüan
Born 1919, in Nachou, in Kwangtung Province. Chinese graphic artist. Member of the Communist Party of China from 1938. Ku Yüan studied at the Lu Hsin Academy of Art in Yenan (1938–40). He also taught there from 1945 and at the Central Academy of Art in Peking from 1950.
The first series of Ku Yüan’s monochromatic wood engravings was characterized by an incisive, terse contour line that contrasted sharply with the white paper (The Past and Present of the Chinese Peasant, 1942), or by the traditional style of Chinese carvings (Year of Rural Life, 1944). Ku Yüan executed a number of expressive color and black-and-white woodcuts in the style of European engravings (We Shall Overcome the Drought, 1944; The Harvest, 1947; and The Live Bridge, 1949).