This article examines how the twentieth-century painter Wu Guanzhong (1919–2010) forged an expressive ink language between Chinese and Western traditions. After outlining his training under Lin Fengmian and Pan Tianshou in Hangzhou, his studies in Paris, and the political pressures he faced in the People’s Republic, which led him to shift from oil painting to the Chinese medium, the author discusses how he linked abstraction to concrete phenomena. Wu’s metaphor of painting as a kite whose string must stay tied to life distinguished his approach from Western non-objective art, a difference highlighted by Michael Sullivan, who saw Bada Shanren as Wu’s model of abstraction. The article reviews comparisons between Wu and Jackson Pollock, noting with Peter Sturman and Richard Barnhart that his flowing lines and splashed dots are rooted in seventeenth-century individualist painting as much as in Paris. Particular attention is given to Wu’s Hong Kong cityscapes of the 1990s, such as City Night (1997), in which grids of black and white lines and bright colour abstract the metropolis. The author argues that Wu, like his Hong Kong peers, muted questions of colonial identity in favour of reconciling Chineseness and modernity.