Zao Wou-Ki (Zhao Wuji)

signed in Chinese and Pinyin; signed in Pinyin and dated 25.5.2001 on the reverse, framed

Marlborough Gallery
Private collection, China
TIANHENG, Shanghai, 28 June, 2011, lot 0616

Zao Wou-Ki, p.17

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Zao Wou-ki believed that ideas expressed through painting could not easily be expressed in words. After 1959, he rarely gave titles to his own works, and instead tended to name them after completion dates or simply leave them untitled. This was not only because language is ineffectual against visuality, but also because it often prompts superfluous references to things in the real world. 25.5.2001 from 2001 is quite different from Zao's earlier expressive and purely abstract paintings, indicating his renewed interest in figuration late in his career. Here he exploits the various qualities of lines in Chinese ink painting to orchestrate the elegant and vivacious dance of two small trees. It is difficult to determine the trees' form in the impressionistic, misty scene, which affords the viewer much room for imagination. The primary colours of yellow and green mix and fuse energetically and rhythmically, but remain pure and subtle, without any hint of cloying excess. This painting visually not only manifests Zao Wou-ki's tranquil state of mind at old age, but also his lifelong commitment to the free expression of his personal experience, even as he pursued the vast and the profound in his large-scale abstract works. For Zao, the pursuit of spiritual freedom was in none else than the comingling of colours and the interweaving of brushwork.