It has been ten years since Zao Wou-Ki passed away. Looking up at his smiling face, I always feel a tinge of warmth in my heart. In the early summer of 1985, I studied with him at his workshop for a full month. I drew two human bodies and one portrait. The subject of the portrait was Lalan, Madame Zao herself. The works remain with me and serve as a reminder of that period. My memories are as vivid as ever. Three decades have since passed and I cannot help wondering how quickly time has passed. There always lurks in the back of my reflections a subtle state of mind. In 2004, Mr. Zao visited me by himself, and I accompanied him on a visit to the site of the Art School in Luoyuan. Sitting on the balcony, we gazed at the boats drifting in the West Lake and marveled at the ease with which the mountains blend into the lake. Mr. Zao was quick to mirth like a child. Perhaps he was struck by childhood memories. There was hardly any wave on the lake. And the peaceful reflections in the lake were steeped in the dark colors of passing time. The very night, Mr. Zao dropped by my studio. He entreated me to give up the position of President of the Academy and focus on painting instead. He even demonstrated the subtle art of using paint oil. A month later, the telephone of my studio started ringing and on the other side, Mr. Zao laboriously explained to me that he had bought me some oil and mixed it with color. When he brought it to the post office, he was informed that he could not send it by mail, because oil was considered hazardous material. He was very apologetic in the call. I stood there by the telephone long after the call. The oil was not really a matter of great significance, but it entailed some serious expectations which deeply moved me. Such understanding and care left a lasting impression on my mind. On Mr. Zao’s 100th birthday in 2020, China Academy of Art was planning to curate a retro exhibition in his honor, but had to cancel due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This year marks the 10th anniversary of Mr. Zao’s passing. China and France are working together on this exhibition commemorating Mr. Zao’s legacy. As we trace his footprints in history and his explorations far and wide, we could not help marveling at his style, so closely aligned with the Dao, and as his name has aptly summed up, the Great Dao is infinite (Wou-ki).

Reflecting on the time spent at Mr. Zao Wou-Ki’s workshop, I would never forget the candid conversations we had sitting around Mr. Zao during the breaks between our sketching sessions. Mr. Zao was a man of few words, and the main point he was trying to make was that “we need to learn from the outstanding traditions of our nation, from the first-rate masters across the world, that we should combine both aspects and inject our own individual traits. Only in this way can we naturally integrate every aspect in order to form our own style, which should not be local, but rather global. The world is turning into a much smaller place, with East & West penetrating into each other, blurring the boundaries between Chinese and western painting. Do not limit yourself with a label. We must stand tall and on top of world art to have a broad view”. Such words may seem nothing ordinary today, but the words from an artist of international renown at the beginning of the country’s opening up make students aspiring to learn about the new trends of world art reflect hard on their own state of mind. Here, Mr. Zao was not suggesting that we return to tradition, but rather how we could stand on top of world art. This remains a thought-provoking proposition. Mr. Zao demonstrated with his example how “painting should breathe”. The vital sign of breathing entails two aspects, 1) the breath of the brushstroke of the painting; and 2) the style that arises from personal edification in the process of viewing and representing.

Mr. Zao said, “when you start to paint, you might as well forget everything, just as in meditation. Allow your emotions and personality to rise to the surface and connect to the painting through your hands. A painting needs to breathe just as much as a person does. Let your entire physical existence come into contact with the surface of the painting, allow your breaths to flow freely on it. When you allow the surface of your painting to breathe, it will also help yourself breathe.” Mr. Zao was not unlike an old monk sharing with us in succinct words his experience of easing into meditation. His tips seem to be closely linked to the free spirit of abstract art, yet also entail the gist of the Eastern strains of thought that allow art to enliven the spirit and express with a sense of unattachment that aims to transcend concepts in order to realize the breakthroughs in one's own life. Mr. Zao would restore this transcendence to the vital experience of inhaling and exhaling and advocate the freedom of “natural existence” prized in the Eastern traditions in order to cultivate the human spirit and align it with nature’s breathing rhythms. His profound reflections were gradually felt by all of us in the many decades of artistic practice and in the endless explorations in Chinese modernity.

Zao Wou-Ki was born in the 1920s and left for Paris towards the end of the 1940s. He initially created a series of works in lithography. These works were shot through with a nostalgia for the homeland, yet opened up a line art approach characteristic of Eastern poetics. According to the French poet and artist Henri Michaux (1899 – 1984), he has felt in Zao Wou-Ki's works a profound poetic that transcends the division between East and West. The antiphony between Western poetry and Eastern painting heralded the beginning of the international career of Mr. Zao. He wrote with profound feelings that “something within my life emerged without me noticing.” In the beginning of the 1950s, Mr. Zao traversed Europe, yet deep in the peregrinator's heart was an affinity for the Eastern stone steles. The inscriptions on oracle bones were activated by a spark. A mysterious breath that drifted through the past to present and became one with the cosmos was lit up. The ancient, drifting pulsations freed Zao Wou-Ki from the influence of Paul Klee and integrated his work into the terrific beauty of Eastern characters whose legendary invention coincided with the spectacles of “millet raining from the sky and ghosts howling at night”.

Here, Mr. Zao harvested the way his life “breathed”. In Homage to Qu Yuan (Fig.1) and Homage to Du Fu, Mr. Zao opened up a majestic “tombstone mode” in order to activate the endless bereavement buried deep in man’s heart. He let his heart roam alone above the Paris art scene and detected a landscape that transcends both East and West. This landscape is characterized by lines drawn with a reckless abandonment and lit up by golden, coppery glitters. Mr. Zao Wou-Ki integrated his understanding of the oil colors into a holistic, Eastern ambience, and conveyed the free style of ancient calligraphers in almost neurotic, fiber-like lines. He was not only painting the earthly, embodied landscape. Rather he was evoking the inner light of the landscape through a manner of painting that privileged emptiness and void. Let us hear his own passionate accounts of his approach,

“faced with the canvas, I must fight against space. I not only have to fill it, but also have to breathe life into it, plunge myself into it. I would like to express a sense of motion, either convoluted or in a lightening speed. With contrasts and multiple vibrations of the same color, I would like to make the canvas jump. I want to locate a center point that glows.” Such a center point that glows is exactly where his mind vibrated. Since 1958, Mr. Zao’s works were mostly titled by the dates they were completed. The “untitled” works can be seen as journals of his own circumstances. There were homesickness, bereavement, anxiety and despair in these works. Through painting, Mr. Zao took pastoral care of the landscape within his mind and his spiritual overlook. The landscape alternated between high and low. The painterly freedom he allowed himself and the pulsating texture of the long brushes all recorded his daily breaths which bore witness to the anxiety and strife they went through and returned to a world that was at peace with his mind. Mr. Zao once said with heartfelt sentiment, “sometimes when I gaze at a completed work, I would be surprised to find that it gives expression to my anger, my peace, or anger followed by peace. My paintings thus become indexes to my own emotions, because I never hide my emotions or states of mind.” In this sense, Mr. Zao can be viewed as an epochal, world-class modern poet of the second half of the 20th century.

Modernity runs through the modern history of humankind like a river, one that never stops with its tidal waves. On both sides of the river of modernity are the landscapes of East and West. The vastness of the landscapes bring different cultural orientations and changes of season, due to the differences in geopolitics, climate and character. In the last century, many envoys of culture ferried between the two sides, experiencing different cultures in their own unique styles and implications and reflecting on the convergences and divergences. Whether tracing the absurd musings of Baudelaire that are filled with symbolic brews, or detecting a Daoist undertone of “clarity emerging from a slowly settling chaos” in Existentialist reflections; whether imagining the inspired performance of a symphony of strings and brass in the brushstrokes of Eastern calligraphy, or discovering all of a sudden the poetic loss and seeking in a cadenza of andante and adagio, we see the sails constantly traverse the river of modernity. Mr. Zao’s sail was one of the tallest in this endless ferry journey.

In 1998, China Academy of Art celebrated its 70th anniversary. We took Mr. Zao’s 18.12.59 (Fig.2) on loan, which allowed us intimate contact with Mr. Zao’s paintings. In 1957, Mr. Zao left for New York and discovered the tremendous drive and weightiness of American painting. The free splashes of color evoked in him a distant memory of the traditional Chinese style of the wild cursive script. With this newly discovered abandonment, Mr. Zao was thoroughly freed from the signification of objects and characters and opened up a new chapter of paintings without titles. 18.12.59 is set in a tone of red and glows like flames. A certain mountainous air comes down from the top and cracks open the center of the canvas, as though penetrated by a spiritual light that lights up the perpetual darkness of history. It springs out of an imprisoned promontory and pours a vital force into the fissures between emptiness and substance. It is the force of heaven and earth that emerged at the beginning of our universe. Mr. Zao once remarked, “the Chinese tradition is so rich and elevated. Chinese painting has the most appropriate economy of space and light. Why don’t we pursue these qualities that are the envy of Westerners?” Mr. Zao stood on a vast Wasteland, as if in a thunderstorm created by the convergence of East and West. The depth of his oil colors and the softness of his brushstrokes constitute a strange yet smooth expansion. Eastern calligraphy and landscape painting were expressed in the abandonment of Western oil painting. It was activated by the vital force of his own era and distilled into an expressiveness of momentum and breaths, thereby opens up a glamorous world of afterglow. This is an attempt at creative synthesis founded on world art, a path beyond the East West dichotomy.

Since the workshop of 1985, Mr. Zao plunged himself into a new change. In 1986, he created a series of large-scale works titled Homage to Henri Matisse. This series is characterized by simpler structures, bolder colors and less complicated layouts. Works in this series seemed to have absorbed the essence of modern art embodied in Matisse’s works and are filled with a thirst for adventure. Here, in various configurations of blue, black and red, there exists a sense of stability that takes on the vast cosmos in a wise yet humble fashion which in turn nurtures an empty yet fulfilling air. When confronted by the sudden representation of the infinite cosmos, a life force blossoms. Standing in front of these large paintings, we look into a hidden yet infinite world beyond us. What have we seen? Li Bai’s dream about climbing Mount Tianmu? Or Su Shi’s ruminations on a moonlit night by the rocky shores of Chibi on the Yangtze River? Or the mysterious cauldron of Eastern and Western culture and its glimmering spiritual light?

In the spring of 1989, I paid Mr. Zao a visit at his Parisian home together with several classmates of his workshop at China Academy of Art. Mr. Zao pointed at his well-insulated studio and told us that he was always caught up in a struggle there. Sometimes, a large painting would fall on him, and he could not find his way out for over ten minutes. In fact, this is an indulgence during a journey of the soul. When caught in such a state of mind, he was like a child in search of his way home. Moved by the art of painting, he harvested a spiritual freedom and carefreeness while transcending the here and now in a pure fashion and freeing himself on the spiritual landscape. In 2004, in his last large-scale oil painting, the triptych Wind Waves in the Sea, where the horizon was but a blur, a lonesome boat was adrift.(Fig.3) The same boat emerged first in his early line drawings. Half a century later, it made its sudden reappearance in the same lonely and carefree manner, jaded yet indulgent. The boat is a portrayal as well as manifestation of destiny, one that ferries between East and West. Here Mr. Zao examined its origin and discovered where it would settle.

Hence we could say in his memory, “the clouded peaks and broad streams of the Yangtze River bear witness to Mr. Zao’s elevated, durable style”.

August 20th, 2023

All works by Zao Wou-Ki : ⓒ Zao Wou-Ki-ProLitteris, Zurich.