It was an early summer afternoon thirty years ago. I ran into a schoolgirl who spoke Mandarin Chinese with a strong Cantonese accent at a small fishing port in Shanwei, the East of Guangdong Province. She, high-spirited with vigor and vitality, carried a small painting folder for the quick field sketch by the side of docked fishing boats, devotedly looking at the profoundly unadorned fishing boats, so the images of fishermen vividly appeared under her brush. It seemed to me that she had bestowed all the unromantic scenes with a passion and a poetic elegance. Even after her departure out of my sight, I could still remember the vivid and interesting images under her brush.   
Time has passed and it one day I saw some of the paintings clepicting trees, distant mountains and gurgling rivers at an art exhibition titled “Small Grass Studio.” In those paintings, the smoothly flowing lines, the warm grey color of the sky and the elegantly shaped figures seemed to be an ode to the life and freedom. During those years, I was engaged in the planning and organizing the art events sponsored by China National Artists Association. I found the name of  Wenzhi Zhang on the tag. Wenzhi approached me, an energetic young female artist, less than thirty years old, but had self-confidence and elegance. Just at that moment, I found that she was fully immersed into the creative enthusiasm and gave her readers one surprise after another by having her art works published in newspapers from time to time.  
In my impression, her persistent pursuit of art is close to an infatuation. Her paintings became more and more mature, so if she followed that path along, she might be a very successful painter. But only God knows which whim she was seized by to fall in love with lacquer painting; creation is just like a performance on the wire rope in an acrobatics. The Chinese lacquer is a paint collected from the deep forest in the southwestern region of China. Some people may be very allergic to the paint, thus causing an intolerably intense itch. Just because a unique branch solely originating from the traditional technology of So, she selected the major of the lacquer painting in a College of Fine 
Arts in which she delved herself into the profound studies of lacquer painting. Lacquer  can produce a mysterious beauty after being blended with other paints in the process of creation. However, Wenzhi Zhang forged boldly ahead and selected such an expressive media to interpret her feelings by creating a large number of frescos and individual paintings. Eventually, she became a black horse in the circle of lacquer painting. 
It was her blazing lust for creativity or the strong appeal of the flames in the ancient kilns of the South that brought her back to the world of ceramic art, fresco and sculpture. She flew over the vast Pacific Ocean to the States in order to have a better understanding of the philosophy and techniques of contemporary art. I could see that she demonstrated her dexterity in producing a huge ceramic fresco with complicated compositions by kneading the clay into various shapes step by step. The kneaded clay was cut into desired shapes and then put into the flaming kiln for firing at a high temperature. Thinking of her silhouette against the brilliant flames, I suddenly conjured up Madam Curie and 
Kathe Kollwitz. On the altar of science and culture, we have one more female artist who has devoted herself. It sounds somewhat tragic, but her answer is always a smile on her face. 
In my opinion, being an artist, Wenzhi Zhang’s strong desire for creativity has unshakably taken a deep root. She has merged her soul into “fire” and “clay.” Her highly expressive ceramic works have steered traditional pottery art towards modernity the artistic perceptions, forms and the exquisite use of materials and transformed it into a visual force in a more contemporary sense by absorbing the quintessence of the Western culture. 
Without any doubt, Wenzhi Zhang has made her contributions to the revival of the contemporary ceramic art in China and great efforts to her creative practices. 
Obviously, the little girl that I met at the small fishing port in the east of Guangdong Province has taken it upon herself to do something great in this field, so she will never give up. 


Always pushing to the new bank,
Flowing ahead at the long night,
Could we cast anchor for even a single day 
As we sail through the turbulent ocean? 
——“The Lake” by Lamartine