Zao Wou-Ki, Mon Pays
‘The still-lifes, flowers, and animals have vanished. I endeavour to use symbols to express my imagination, painted on a background that is almost a single tone… However, symbols gradually become forms and backgrounds become spaces. Things start to emerge in the mind, and the painting starts to move and come alive.’
In the early 1950s, Zao Wou-Ki was invited to hold gallery solo shows in numerous cities across Europe and the United States. In 1954, the Cincinnati Art Museum mounted his first retrospective. That same year, Life magazine ran a feature entitled ‘Artist from East Is a Hit in West: Zao Wou-Ki Paints a Poetic World’. The three-page spread, complete with colour photographs, introduced his recent work and lauded him as an Eastern painter shaking up the Western art world. During his rise in the international scene, Zao’s work underwent a transformation. In the past, he had defined still lifes and landscapes with succinct lines, but Paul Klee inspired him to fuse representational and abstract elements. However, when all of this became a set of creative constraints, Zao Wou-Ki took another decisive turn in his work, removing representational description entirely and replacing it with a set of symbols that looked like writing yet remained illegible. He discovered a new mode of artistic expression that incorporated Eastern painting and launched his Oracle Bone Period.
In 1957, Zao Wou-Ki and modern French master Pierre Soulages travelled to New York for the first time and visited Samuel Kootz. The next year, Zao showed at Kootz Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, which was an important entrée into the international art world for him. Mon Pays (Lot 1045), painted in this pivotal year, serves as important evidence of Zao’s development shortly after his arrival in New York. By that time, his Oracle Bone period work had matured. The imagery tended toward pure abstraction, so only the title alluded to Zao’s creative inspiration: majestic natural views. Through his work, he expressed the beauty of nature. With what he saw and felt in his sojourns through mountains and streams, he was able to convey a nostalgia for every tree and blade of grass in his homeland.
‘Talent in the arts is not only the product of some practiced skill, but the fruit of all our attitudes as living creatures, of all our being. As I have already written somewhere: one does not paint with brush and colours only. But also with one’s heart.’
Many of the works from Zao Wou-Ki’s Oracle Bone Period focus on natural elements. Only a few are dedicated to deceased friends or Chinese heroes, such as Epitaph (1954), Hommage à Chu-Yun (1955), and Hommage à Tou-Fou (1956). Mon Pays, which he painted after these classic pieces, follows a similar trajectory, continuing the unadorned yet expansive power unique to this creative period. The key element in these paintings is Zao’s transformation of profound and ancient oracle bones and bronze vessels. A close reading reveals sweeping motions with the tip of the brush that leave fine, intersecting markings, representing earth-shattering changes in a work that feels as if it has been eroded by the passage of time. The lead white and black ink lines scramble into a scene that resembles a magnificent mountain range, extending horizontally from the work’s central axis. The ice blue on the right side of the painting rises from the chaos, like a babbling brook flowing amidst the ridges and peaks. He sublimated the incisive yet flowing ochre and ink lines into inscriptions from oracle bones and bronze vessels, and the infusion of Abstract Expressionism completely divorces the imagery from the form and meaning of the characters. With its rising, surging vitality, Mon Pays presages the advent of Zao Wou-Ki’s Hurricane Period (1959-1972).
In the 1950s, Paris was a foreign land for China-born Zao. With this outsiders’ perspective, he created Ailleurs (1955), which sold at the Sotheby’s Hong Kong Modern Art Evening Sale in autumn 2016. The piece has a mysterious, profound aura that offers glimpses of Chinese cultural treasures that have been buried deep for thousands of years, while also evoking the mists of Song landscape painting. The oracle bone symbols that appear throughout the simple and deep image seem to fuse the artist’s impressions of his adopted home of Paris with fresh yet remote memories of his hometown. Two years later, Zao painted Mon Pays (1957), a work that takes the abstraction one step further than Ailleurs. Mon Pays is completely devoid of narrative. With a thoughtful yet simple style, he has used textured, heavy colour and uninhibited brushwork to create a work abounding in intense rhythms and unknowable mysteries. In Ailleurs and Mon Pays, Zao Wou-Ki, an artist living far from home, does not stray from his artistic haven. This is a seemingly boundless land, without reference to any particular landform. He condenses the full weight of his emotion into the wavering, misty contours of the landscape.
Zao’s Oracle Bone Period represents his artistic maturity and his accomplishments in the Western art world. Mon Pays is a rare and important piece from this distinct phase because of its early date, the brevity of Zao’s Oracle Bone Period, and the more modest dimensions of most of the works on the market. Quand il fait beau, which is a similar size and date, sold for HK$44.6 million at the Sotheby’s Hong Kong Modern Art Evening Sale in spring 2018. Mon Pays is not at all constrained by the form and meaning of the characters, and the influence of Abstract Expressionism is more notable; Zao completely turns toward abstraction—which is rare among his oracle bone paintings—and transcends other works from the same period. According to the rare Parke-Bernet Galleries catalogue attached to this piece, Mon Pays was exhibited at Galerie de France, bearing witness to Zao’s continent-spanning artistic career. The original collector purchased Mon Pays at a 1965 auction held by Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York. Mon Pays has been held in private hands for nearly six decades and is now appearing at auction for the first time; collectors should not let this opportunity slip through their fingers.
趙無極《故鄉》
「靜物、花、動物都消失了，我努力以符號來表現想象，畫在幾乎是單色調的底上……然後，慢慢的，符號成了形體、背景形成空間，心裡的東西好像開始浮現出來，畫開始動了起來、活了起來。」
趙無極的「甲骨文時期」作品多以自然元素為題，僅有少數以紀念故友，或緬懷家園故人為題，如1954年的《墓誌銘》、1955年的《向屈原致敬》以及1956年的《向杜甫致敬》等。創作於上述經典作品之後的《故鄉》，可見遵循相似軌迹，延續這段創作時期獨有的古樸、蒼茫的雄渾氣勢：畫面主調展現蛻變自遠古甲骨與銅器的沈穩色調，細觀可見筆鋒縱橫帶動，交互刷寫的細膩痕跡，滲透著彷如歷經時間沖刷而成的晦明變化；畫面的鉛白與墨黑線條，結合如群山屹立般的景象，沿畫面中軸橫向蔓延，構成延綿山巒的壯闊圖景；畫幅右側的冰藍渲染從渾沌之中泛泛而起，似是峰巒之間的潺潺流水；銳利而流暢的赭黑線條，昇華自甲骨與吉金上的鐫刻銘文，經過美國抽象表現主義之洗禮，已然徹底擺脫字形字義之約束，更顯飛揚騰躍、活力賁張，預示趙無極下一個風格時期「狂草時期」（1959至1972年）即將降臨。
五〇年代的巴黎是來自中國的趙無極之「他鄉」，1955年，藝術家以異鄉人的視覺，創作上拍於2016年香港蘇富比現當代藝術秋季晚拍的《他鄉》，作品散發神秘深邃的意境，似是在引領觀者窺探深埋中華文化數千年的遠古瑰寶，散發著如宋代傳統山水世界裡霧氣氤氳之態；渾厚沉穩的畫面中可見的甲骨文符號的形態穿梭其中，所描繪的猶似融合藝術家腦海中對異鄉巴黎的印象，以及記憶猶新卻又時而印象模糊的家鄉。相隔兩年，趙無極於1957年創作本畫《故鄉》，與《他鄉》相比，本作在抽象構成上已然更進一步，邁向全面擺脫敍事的成份，在深邃古樸的風格之上，用上富於肌理而且凝渾厚重色彩，淋漓瀟灑的運筆，盎然舞動出強烈的節奏感，予人神秘難測之意境。作為一個永遠的異鄉人，趙無極《他鄉》和本作《故鄉》所描繪的，均離不開其心中屬於藝術的安棲之所：它是一片舉目無垠的大地，山川景物皆不具備指向性，滿腔思鄉情懷，凝成畫面上惺忪迷濛的山川輪廓，恆久雋永。
「甲骨文時期」乃趙無極藝術上臻於成熟、在西方畫壇卓然成家的象徵，由於其年代甚早、為時較短，在市場上流通的作品以中、小型作品為主，而《故鄉》可謂此特殊時期中其一珍稀代表作。與之尺幅相同、創作年份相近的，當數2018年香港蘇富比現代藝術春季晚拍以港幣44,619,500成交的《晴空萬里》，而本畫徹底擺脫字形字義之約束，其經過美國抽象表現主義之洗禮的痕跡更為顯著，全然邁向抽象巔峰時期的步伐亦超越同時期誕生之作，在藝術家「甲骨文時期」作品中實屬罕見。按隨本作附上的帕克-伯內特畫廊的珍貴圖錄，《故鄉》曾展出於巴黎法蘭西畫廊，由此更見證藝術家當年縱橫歐美的事業發展。值得一提的是，《故鄉》之原藏家於1965年紐約帕克-伯內特畫廊拍賣會購得本作，經歷近六十年私人珍藏之後，如今首登拍場，實為藏家不容錯過的絕佳珍藏之選。
