Zao Wou-Ki (Zhao Wuji)

Important Private Asian Collection

Paris, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Zao Wou-Ki, 14 October-7 December 2003, p. 83

This work is in overall very good condition except some minor, stable hairline craquelrues in the upper left and lower right quarters . There is no apparent inpainting under UV light examination.
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Antiquity Reilluminated: Zao Wuo-ki Soleil brillant a travers la forêt

Zao Wou-ki was a star in the international art world already in the early 1950’s. In 1951, Galerie Pierre of Paris mounted his first solo show in France. In the next year, Cadby-Birch Gallery in New York followed suit and an issue of Life featured his paintings extensively. The year 1954 was a crucial transitional point in Zao’s career. He was no longer satisfied with drawing natural sceneries in simple lines. The figurative still-lives and sceneries and child-like poetic spaces in his past works, as well as Paul Klee’s influence, had gradually become a limitation. Zao wanted to transcend himself and develop a truly unique artistic language.

“The Primordial Line is the basis of all things and the root of the myriad phenomena.”

Shitao

The line is the beginning of everything in Chinese painting. When Western painters began to turn towards chiaroscuro and volume, Chinese painters were still preoccupied with line and regarded it as the primary means of depiction and expression. Zao Wou-ki returned to line in the early 1950’s, and in 1954 incorporated the most profound spirit of Chinese culture into his painting through line. From this point onwards, his line would no longer be a Western line or that of Paul Klee. Rather, it would hark back to the origins of the East Asian civilisation and inspire his abstract painting. Oracle bone inscriptions, having first emerged in the capital of the Shang Dynasty three millennia ago, was subsequently lost to history until being rediscovered during the Guangxu reign in the late Qing period. Concerning divination and historical events, these inscriptions reflect the ancient Chinese worldview and, as the earliest examples of ideographic calligraphy, illuminate the deep connection between image and writing in Chinese culture.

Turning back towards his native China, Zao Wou-ki sought inspiration in oracle bones, Han-dynasty rubbings, and the historical traditions of calligraphy and painting. In Vent of 1954, considered Zao’s very first abstract painting, figuration also completely disappears behind a vast and nearly monochromatic space, replaced by a series of flowing and interconnected symbols. As the artist himself said, “Still-life subjects, flowers, and animals have disappeared. The symbols I use are imaginary and have fallen into the monochromatic background. In my exploration, the symbols in the painting gradually take form, and the background becomes a space. My painting is animated and comes alive.” Here, inaugurating a brand-new kind of artistic expression and his “Oracle Bone period,” Zao Wou-ki has found freedom in his own painting.

Manifestation of Dao and evocative association with nature

Like Vent, Soleil brillant a travers la forêt (Lot 1023) dates from 1954. Zao began to use dates to title his paintings only in 1958. During the intervening four years, his use of colour and compositions were all thematically related to nature. One may say that his paintings from this period appear abstract but generate certain associations through the natural themes in their titles, such as wind, rain, thunder and lighting, and snow. The only primarily red painting that Zao created in 1954, Soleil brillant a travers la forêt impresses the viewer with the heat and brightness of the sun. Varying in density, the lines generate a hospitable, mesmerising rhythm. The heat of the red is interwoven with white. Archaic-feeling lines resemble light rays penetrating the lines and landing on the forest. Zao Wou-ki has discovered a way to express the miraculous creativity of nature abstractly, without the mediation of figuration. The nature he depicts is an infinite space animated by the pictograph-like lines. In him painting comes close to the manifestation of the Dao in nature.

Zao Wou-ki arrived in France in 1948, at the height of post-war abstraction. Western artists influenced by East Asian calligraphy, such as the French-German painter Hans Hurting, Gerard Schneider of Switzerland, Pierre Soulages of France, and the Americans Mark Tobey and Yves Klein, in turn exerted their influence the non-figurative art of Europe and the abstract expressionism of the United States. Even as the centre of the art world shifted towards to New York, Zao Wou-ki and European abstract artists laid the foundation of the first wave of post-war attraction in Paris. Rooted in Chinese cultural traditions, Zao sought inspiration not only in the form of calligraphy but also in the origins of Chinese writing itself, distilling from it a salient worldview and state of mind. With his distinctive personal language, he successfully synthesised the beauty of traditional Chinese writing and imagery with abstract painting. By animating abstract painting with the elegant mind-state, spiritual resonance, and appreciation for the abstractness of phenomena in classical Chinese aesthetics, Zao in turn forged a path towards the world for traditional Chinese art. Soleil brillant a travers la forêt does not depict any identifiable object, but the meanings and feelings that it evokes transcend any figurative representation, and inspire far richer imagination in the viewer. Published by the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, Soleil brillant a travers la forêt is a rare early work from Zao’s Oracle Bone series.