Despite great suppression of artistic experimentation, Western representative art was sanctioned and encouraged, and used to spread communist propaganda through the images of happy, working class figurative art to a people who could understand the painted images these paintings represented.

While our Western art culture disintegrated into abstraction and paint thrown on canvases with no content, the Russians and Chinese continued the study and practice of classical painting. With the easing of tensions between China and the West, many of the Chinese, trained in the classical style practiced by the Russians, immigrated to the United States and brought their long-lost expertise to America.

Zhaoming Wu is one of those artists, whose knowledge and talents merge into a convoluted path from the Nineteenth Century Masters down to us, today. He is currently one of the most valued faculty members of the San Francisco Academy of Art, and he instructs and mentors artists in the graduate program in representative painting and drawing.