Zao Wou-Ki (Zhao Wuji)

Important Private Asian Collection

Paris, Artcurial, ZAO WOU-KI, Retrospective, 22 September - 10 November 1988 

Claude Roy, Zao Wou-Ki, Cercle d’Art, Paris, 1996, p.163
Jean Leymarie, ed., Zao Wou-Ki, Cercle d’Art, Paris, 2003, plate 576

This work is in overall very good condition. There is no apparent inpainting under UV light examination.
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An Internal Landscape: A Long-Awaited Return to Nature

The clouds and sun reflect upon each other
The air and water are clear and bright.
There is nobody to enjoy this fairyland,
Nobody to tell legends of this place.
Xie Lingyun

In 1981, Zao Wou-Ki held his first solo exhibition at a national-level gallery in France, the galeries nationales du Grand Palais; then, in 1983, he was invited by the Chinese Ministry of Culture to return to his alma mater in Hangzhou for a solo exhibition for the first time, and also exhibited his work at the National Museum of History in Taipei. These exhibitions in the early 1980s greatly increased Zao Wouki’s fame in Asia. The artist took advantage of the opportunities provided by the exhibitions to frequently travel in Asia, and these travels exerted an intangible influence on his painting. Ideas from Eastern philosophy and landscape painting became more prevalent in his artwork, and featured in the current auction, is an outstanding representative work from this period. Chinese painting highly prizes panoramic “true landscapes” featuring not only substantial mountains, rivers, forests, and structures but also insubstantial images of clouds, mists, and air in order to display the technical skill of the artist. After tasting the essence of landscape painting, Zao adapted it into his own broad and spacious abstract landscapes. The poet Xie Lingyun, from the Northern and Southern Dynasties period, describes landscapes in order to express the ideal of simplicity and truth that lies at the centre of traditional Chinese landscape painting. Zao’s reinterpretation of this ideal lent new vitality to the landscape tradition; he imagined an idyllic realm capable of quieting the mind amid the clamour of modern times.

A Gentle Breeze, the Voice of the River

Zao Wou-Ki’s painting practice can be characterized by phases of narration and sentimentality in the 1950s, wild lines and power in the 1960s, and a return to black-and-white ink painting in the 1970s. Then, in the 1980s, the artist began to experiment with a hazy and expansive idiom that bore a distinct resemblance to the literati tradition of landscape painting in Chinese culture. Zao supplemented this tradition with Modernist ideas from Western abstract painting. Using simplified forms and meticulous lines, Zao created a graceful aesthetic that was both an ideal of the Chinese literati landscape tradition and an unparalleled achievement in the realm of modern painting. He used canvases of special dimensions to portray great expanses of misty mountains and rivers in horizontal form, rising and falling likes waves. These paintings contain a sense of vast depth akin to looking out over a wide, flat vista. In traditional Chinese landscape painting, mountains and trees were considered “substance” and water was considered “void”, but in Zao Wou-Ki’s abstract scenes, the water could be considered “substance” as Zao transformed clear streams and broad lakes into the protagonists of his paintings. The gentle and pleasing tone of these works became the signature characteristic of the artist’s expressive, emotional works from the mid-1980s.

The Endless Echoes of Billowing Waves

Zao Wou-Ki only painted three works of such elongated horizontal dimensions in 1985. He concentrated the scenery in the bottom third of this canvas, where he used light pressure to apply oil paints as dark as ink blots up to the margins. Farther up on the canvas, he favoured gradually lighter shades of blue. Although Zao painted in oils, he drew on the ink-painting technique of utilising the contrasts of wet/dry and saturated/dilute to use a single pigment in a variety of ways with exquisite skill. The shades of blue and the large swaths of white form an intense contrast that enhances the painting’s spacious sense of breadth and depth. The faint line of mountain crests rises towards the upper left corner of the canvas. This use of diagonal composition can be traced back to Zao’s initial foray into abstraction in the late 1950s. Nearly three decades later, this compositional characteristic is a key part of this painting; it gently interposes across the tableau with a sense of generative motion. This dynamic structure also contributes to the great sense of quantity shaped by the brushwork in the foreground. Amid this layout, Zao uses minute and rhythmic brushstrokes to create the image of a watery oblivion, successfully expressing the notion of refined seclusion favoured by Chinese scholar-painters of antiquity while also revealing the unique status of this artwork in terms of artistic value.

Fluid Aesthetics: East and West

Zao Wou-Ki’s choice of colours in this painting are particularly interesting. The contrasting hues of blue and white bring to mind Chinese porcelain, in which cobalt shades of blue are applied to pure white clay and then coated with a transparent glaze. Zao takes this distinctively Asian aesthetic and transfers it to the canvas, where the blues and whites set each other off in his abstract composition. In this way, he transforms the sumptuous beauty of blue-and-white porcelain into an impassive landscape with subtle characteristics. In the West, the post-war painter Yves Klein is well-known for his monochromatic blue paintings, for which he covered models with a specific hue of blue paint (“international Klein blue”) and pressed their nude bodies against large white canvases. Zao Wou-Ki arrived in Paris in 1948, just as the post-war abstract painting movement took off. Since then, his abstract paintings have ceaselessly evolved. Thirty years after his arrival in Paris, he authentically incorporated Chinese cultural implications into his paintings, and successfully created an abstract realm in which the heavens, the earth, and the myriad things are joined in natural unity.