Yet behind Gu Jingzhou's consummate mastery and effortless artistry lay hidden a profound loneliness and bitterness in his heart. In his youth, Gu Jingzhou had endured physical suffering and unwilling career choices. In his emotional life, he likewise suffered torment: he did not marry until the age of knowing destiny[1], and after barely twenty years together, his wife contracted a terminal illness. In early spring of 1983, Gu Jingzhou, then 69 years old by traditional reckoning, accompanied his wife Xu Yibao to Shanghai to seek medical treatment. With the warm assistance of good friends, they lodged at Huaihai Middle School for as long as three months. During this anxious and melancholy period, with no one to confide in about the bitterness and depression in his heart, he could only choose to converse with clay through his paddle and coils: > "In the spring of the year Guihai, I accompanied my elderly wife to Shanghai for medical treatment of her painful illness. We stayed at Huaihai Middle School. In utter boredom I made several pieces, to commemorate a life's rough journey." Amid the resentful lament that "the river at dusk deepens my sorrow, in mountain depths I hear the partridge's cry," and the disordered, struggling prayers over his wife's ill-fated misfortunes, Gu Jingzhou used forms resembling reflections of his own destiny to tell people everything in his heart. In 1984, Gu Jingzhou's wife, eleven years his junior, succumbed to her incurable disease and departed this world before him. At this time, Gu Jingzhou suffered the greatest blow of his life. Previously, when he had encountered physical suffering and setbacks, or obstacles in his thinking, he would always reflect silently on his own, using time to gradually fade everything. But this— --- [1] Age fifty, according to Confucian tradition