In his studio in Paris, in front of 29.09.64 and of the first version of 21.09.64.
Gallery of Zao Wou-Ki
1976
Barcelona, Spain
With Jean Leymarie and his wife Françoise during the opening of the exhibition at the Joan Prats Gallery in Barcelona.
Gallery of Zao Wou-Ki
1981
Paris, France
Painting with India ink in his studio in Paris.
Gallery of Zao Wou-Ki
1983
Taipei, China
With Françoise in the studio of the painter, Zhang Daqian in Taipei.
Gallery of Zao Wou-Ki
1985
Hangzhou, China
During a lecture at the school of fine arts.
Gallery of Zao Wou-Ki
2010
Gigondas, France
In Saint Cosme priory near Tours, in front of the stained glass windows of the pulpit.
Gallery of Zao Wou-Ki
31 Rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France
École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs.
Achievements
2003
France
At the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, in front of the triptych ‘Mai-Septembre 1989’ for the presentation of his sword of academician on November 26, 2003.
At the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, in front of the triptych ‘Mai-Septembre 1989’ for the presentation of his sword of academician on November 26, 2003.
Zao Wou-Ki was a Chinese-French painter. His artworks are responsible for making the Western and Eastern visual styles meet each other. Zao's aesthetics are best explained as a combination of the abstract method borrowed from the West and the Chinese concept of Tao, best explained as the meditative spirit characteristic to Eastern traditions.
Background
Mr. Zao was born in on February 1, 1920, in Beijing, China. A few months later, his family went to live in Shanghai. He was a member of a family with genetic roots found in Dantu District, Zhenjiang, a famous Jiangsu province in China. His parents were quite wealthy and there are records that prove their bloodline can be connected to the Song Dynasty - such circumstances allowed Zao Wou-Ki to have a very comfortable childhood without much worry about what future has in store for him. Heavily influenced by his father, he took a keen interest in history and classical literature ever since he was a toddler and such explorations encouraged his passion for Chinese calligraphy.
Education
It is in Nantung that young Zao Wou-Ki went to primary school and followed three years of secondary education. From the age of ten, he drew and painted with great freedom. His family did not really impede his desire to be a painter. Thus predisposed in a family of intellectuals where painting had always been honoured, he learnt with his grand-father that calligraphy was an art as long as it was alive and conveyed emotions.
At the age of fifteen, in 1935, Mr. Zao succeeded at the entrance examination of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, with the drawing of the cast of a Greek statue. During six years he learnt to draw from casts and from a live model, he learnt oil painting but also traditional Chinese painting, Western perspective and of the theory of calligraphy. He was taught by Lin Fengmian, Fang Ganmin and Wu Dayu. Young Zao Wou-Ki very quickly started to make oil paintings, graduating in 1941.
At the National Museum of Natural History of Chongqing, in 1942 Wou-Ki organized an exhibition presenting works by Lin Fengmian, Wu Dayu - his director at the Fine Arts School, Guan Liang, Ding Yanyong, Lin Kuang-Tang and himself. Well received by both intellectuals and young painters, this exhibition showed, for the first time, the works of living artists who wanted to break with tradition.
During 1946, while teaching at the Fine Arts School of Hangzhou, Chongqing, Zao Wou-Ki met with Vadime Elisseeff who, at the time, was the Cultural Attaché of the French Embassy in China and who urged him to go to Paris. When coming back to France, Vadime Elisseeff brought back with him some twenty oil paintings that he presented at the Cernuschi Museum at "The exhibition of contemporary Chinese paintings" in 1946.
In 1947, after a personal exhibition in Shanghai, Zao Wou-Ki, aged 27, decided, with his father’s approval, to leave for Paris. He embarked in Shanghai with his wife, Lan-Lan, on February 26th and reached Marseille after 36 days at sea. He discovered Paris and spent his afternoons at the Louvre Museum. He moved to the painters’ district in Montparnasse in a small studio where he became the neighbour of Alberto Giacometti. He learnt French at the Alliance Française and frequented the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He said it was in Paris that he had discovered his personality.
He discovered and marveled at the technique of lithography with the printer Desjobert. He had his first personal exhibition at the Galerie Creuze in May of 1949. His first collector’s book, Lecture par Henri Michaux de huit lithographies de Zao Wou-Ki, was published in 1950.
Abstraction had not fared well in France during the immediate post-World War II period, as its apparent lack of content or subject matter made it seem ill equipped to tackle the brutal realities of the war and its aftermath. But Zao and other artists associated with the École de Paris (School of Paris) were determined to show that abstract painting could speak to this very condition through the intuitive language of color and line. To this end, Zao Wou-Ki began to paint more boldly than ever, combining expressive lines with deeply saturated color. In the mid-1950s he incorporated Chinese influences more directly, sometimes using actual calligraphy instead of loose and winding brushstrokes.
Starting from 1953 many personal exhibitions were organized not only in France but also in Bern, Geneva, Rome, Milan, New-York, etc. In 1954 the Museum of Fine Arts of Cincinnati presented a retrospective exhibition of his etchings. In 1957, Mr. Zao met New York gallerist Samuel Kootz, who encouraged him to paint large-scale works with looser, more gestural brushstrokes. From the 1960s on, his paintings focused on space and movement, with forms resembling flowing streams or effervescent magmas; in the late 1960s as the illness of his second wife Chan May Kan worsened, the style of Zao’s paintings became more frenzied.
During this period, Zao frequently traveled to New York, where he met Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, and other Abstract Expressionists. Later in the 1970s, Zao’s paintings become less focused on line and gesture, striving instead toward an ambient and dreamlike atmosphere in which foreground and background are entirely blurred. Taken in its entirety, Zao’s oeuvre reflects a continual struggle - the artist’s gesture versus the painter’s canvas. Encouraged by Michaux, Zao resumed Chinese ink painting techniques in 1971, which he had given up in 1948 upon arriving in France for fear of being labeled a "Chinese painter."
After long months of grieving, because of his wife's death, Zao Wou-Ki resumed working in 1973-1975. He made very large paintings that would be exhibited in 1975 at the Galerie de France with a foreword of René Char in the catalogue.
While primarily a painter, Mr. Zao collaborated frequently with artists working in other mediums. He worked with the Chiang Ching Dance Company to project slides of his landscapes as the background for a performance at the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse, New York, in 1979. He also illustrated many books of poetry, his earliest collaborations being Henri Michaux’s Lecture, which included eight colored lithographs, and Harry Roskolenko’s Paris Poems, both from 1950. His book projects inspired him to produce a large number of prints and engravings in paper.
The exhibition of Zao Wou-Ki’s big formats at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Charleroi (Belgium) was presented at the Musée d’Histoire et d’Art in Luxemburg in 1980. He was appointed teacher of mural painting at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs by his friend Michel Tourlière, director of the School at the time. In November of the same year an exhibition of paintings and drawings took place at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.
He completed two triptychs for the presentation of works in the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, on the margins of a great exhibition dedicated to Nicolas de Staël in 1891-1892. It was the first time a French museum presented an exhibition of his works. It would then be taken to five Japanese museums: the Fukuoka City Museum, the Nihonbashi Art Gallery in Tokyo, the Fukui Prefectoral Museum, the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art and the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art.
Before going to Beijing where he was invited by the Association of Chinese Artists, Zao Wou-Ki and Françoise Marquet went to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Xian in 1982. In October, invited by I.M. Pei, Zao Wou-Ki attended the opening of the Fragrant Hills Hotel in China, located thirty kilometres out of Beijing, for which he has just completed two large India ink panels (280 x 360 cm).
Starting from 1984, his work became too important to go on with his responsibilities as a teacher, so he resigned from his post at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs. In 1986 the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York dedicated an exhibition to Zao Wou-Ki’s work. In the meantime, the Galerie de France in Paris presented his larger triptych (2,80 x 10 m) a commission he has just completed for Raffles City built by his friend I.M. Pei in Singapore. It was Zao Wou-Ki’s last exhibition at the Galerie de France. Retrospectives of his work were also presented at Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (1993); Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan and also at the Hong Kong Museum of Art (1996); Shanghai Museum (1998-1999); Centro Julio Gonzalez in Valencia, Spain (2001); and Jeu de Paume, Paris (2003), etc.
During 2006 Zao Wou-Ki took part in two important collective exhibitions: "Homenaje - Homage to Chillida" at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and "Edgar Varèse" at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, "L’Envolée lyrique. Paris 1945-1956" at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. In 2007 the exhibition at the Château-Musée in Nemours presented several works that had never been seen before showing the various aspects of his work: oil on canvas, India ink and watercolor on paper, prints illustrating collectors’ books and for the first time, recent works on ceramics and china.
During the spring 2010, he created his last watercolors on paper. In 2011 the gallery de Sarthe Fine Art organized in Hong Kong a personal show "Zao Wou-Ki. Paintings: 1950’s-1960’s". During 2011-2012 Zao Wou-Ki also participated in several collective exhibitions. However, by the end of his life Zao had stopped producing new paintings due to health problems.
Zao Wou-Ki was an internationally-renowned Abstract artist. During his long career, Zao Wou-Ki became a crucial part of the global art scene. This artist is often regarded as one of the most successful Chinese painters of the 20th century.
Mr. Zao's works were constantly exhibited at highly respected museums all over the world. During his lifetime he became a recipient of a range of awards. In 1949 he was awarded first prize in a drawing competition, France. In 1984 Zao was awarded the Legion d’honneur by the French Ministry of Culture. He was promoted by the President of the French Republic to Commandeur de la Legion d’honneur in 1993. In 2006 Zao Wou-Ki was made a Grand Officier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur, and decorated by the French President Jacques Chirac on November 3, 2006, at the Palais de l’Elysée.
Zao Wou-Ki's first wife, Lan-lan, was a composer. They parented one son. In the mid-1950s, the couple divorced. Later he remarried Chan May-Kan, a film actress who had two children from her first marriage. Under the influence of Zao, she became a successful sculptor. In 1972, she committed suicide at age 41 due to mental illness.
