The Tu Zhiwei Art Museum is located along one side of the large Cultural Center. The entrance faces a beautiful interior courtyard.  Inside, celebrants can wander the two elegant galleries, viewing nearly a hundred Tu paintings and prints from an oeuvre that stretches over more than four decades of Mr. Tu's creative artistry in China, Tibet, and the United States.

     Without a doubt, two recently completed large "Body Laguage" murals are the star features of the museum. Each is stunning.  One mural depicts the well known tragic tale of an entire army betrayed, and buried alive, by its own cunning but paranoid emperor. The other is based on an historical tale from China's distant past about a raft capsizing in a Yellow River flood.  Other murals in the same series depict such events as the building of the Great Wall, artist Tu's conception of the tragic death of the concubine Yu, an imagined scene of delight in the music and dancing known to have been enjoyed by the Buddhists who occupied the caves at the Silk Road crossroads of Dunhuang, and the treacherous moment a paranoid emperor turned an army against itself burried the whole, alive, in the earth. 

      At first glance, the museum's murals manifestly are rendered in a realistic style with rounded, muscular figures of action reminiscent of a style favored by American Regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton or the great Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera. But Tu Zhiwei brings to the task a unqiue intelligence and compositional vision. He has rendered these ancient Chinese tales with such emotion, imagination, and peerless technique that the overall composition of the pieces is as complex and provocative as the best of  the abstract expressionsists.

      Seen up close, they are undeniably powerful realistic creations that vibrate with human emotion the deepest of feelings. Viewed at a considerable distance -- which the spacious gallery rooms of the Tu Zhiwei Art Museum comfortably permit -- the murals take on almost an abstract quality that underscores the commonality of his human subjects with the earthly elements around them -- the land, the river, the steep gorge at the foot of the Great Wall -- as if to underscore the intimate relationship each has with the other.  

      Mr. Tu has said he initially set out to create a series of nine such murals, each depicting a signal event in ancient Chinese lore. More recently, he has been heard to muse that he isn't sure he can stop at nine. At least one and possibly two of the murals may now be in private collections.  If, somehow, all should be reunited one day in a single exhibition surely it would be a phenomenal event for both the art world and for those who value Chinese history, mythology, and culture. Perhaps, some day such an event can be held right here, in the Tu Zhiwei Art Museum in Shaoguan, China.