Zao Wou-Ki

Biography

Zao Wou-Ki titled his paintings simply with the date on which he finished them: “29.01.64”, “Juin-Octobre 1985”, “April-September 1987”. The canvas “Juin-Octobre 1985” was the largest format he ever took on. Date-titles give the viewer no hint, and to my mind there is calculation in that: what we face are masses of colour and light that hold the composition together, with no subject to hold on to.

He was born on 1 February 1920 in Beijing, into an educated family of the old aristocracy whose roots lay in Dantu, in Jiangsu province. As a child he was taken to Dantu, where he studied calligraphy. In 1935–1941 he studied painting at the art school in Hangzhou under Lin Fengmian, Fang Ganmin and Wu Dayu, the last two of whom had trained in France. From 1941 to 1947 he taught at the school himself, and during the war with Japan it moved from place to place: to Jiangxi, to Hunan, to Sichuan.

In April 1948 Zao arrived in Paris with his wife, the composer Xie Jinglan. He learned French at the Alliance Française and attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, studying with Othon Friesz. The couple found a studio on the rue du Moulin-Vert in Montparnasse, next door to Alberto Giacometti. His first exhibitions in France were praised by Miró and Picasso. His friends came to include Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung, Nicolas de Staël, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Sam Francis. In 1949 he won first prize in a drawing competition judged by André Lhote and Marcel Gromaire; the prize was a copy of the “History of Western Painting” published by Skira. At the Desjobert printing house he learned lithography. In 1950 Henri Michaux, who became a close friend, brought the dealer Pierre Loeb to his studio, and Zao worked with Loeb until 1957. That same year he first exhibited at the Salon de Mai, where he went on showing until 1978.

In 1951, on a trip to Switzerland, he discovered Paul Klee. From 1952 he was exhibited regularly in Paris, Basel, Lausanne, Washington, Chicago and New York, and in 1953 Roland Petit commissioned him to design the sets for the ballet “La Perle”. At about the same time his painting changed abruptly, and collectors were baffled. “My painting is becoming illegible. Still lifes and flowers no longer exist,” he recalled in 1976. For more than a year his dealer could not sell a single picture. And on 22 November 1954 a retrospective of his prints opened at the Cincinnati Art Museum.

From 1955 he was a friend of the composer Edgard Varèse, to whom he dedicated a painting in 1964, and he went to the Domaine musical concerts run by Pierre Boulez. In 1957 he spent six weeks in Montclair, New Jersey, with his younger brother, painted seven canvases there (his brother later gave the largest to the Detroit Institute of Arts), and went on from there to Tokyo and Hong Kong. His meetings with Michaux made him return to ink technique, to the Chinese drawing on which he had always relied. He often worked in diptychs and triptychs; among those who had influenced him he himself named Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne. In 1964 he became a French citizen.

A good part of his work remains in books. He illustrated editions of Michaux, René Char, André Malraux, Saint-John Perse, Arthur Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Yves Bonnefoy and many others, from 1950 to the mid-1990s.

In 1972 he saw his family in China for the first time since 1948. In 1982 he was invited to paint for the Fragrant Hills Hotel in Beijing, designed by I. M. Pei, and in 1983 he lectured at his old school in Hangzhou. Honours came in the 1990s: the Legion of Honour in 1993, the Praemium Imperiale in 1994. In 2002 he was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and in 2008 the Bibliothèque nationale de France mounted a large retrospective of his graphic work. In his last years he lived in Dully, in the canton of Vaud, on the shore of Lake Geneva.

Zao Wou-Ki died on 9 April 2013 in Nyon, Switzerland. In 2018 the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris showed about forty of his works. And from September 2023 to February 2024 the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, the very school where he had studied and taught, exhibited almost two hundred of his works, 129 of them oil paintings.