Zao Wu-Ki
(1920–)
(–2013)
Zao Wu-Ki
1920–2013
Zao Wou-Ki (1920–2013) was a Chinese-French artist who was known for his ability to seamlessly blend Eastern and Western modes of art production. Born in Beijing in 1920, Wou-Ki moved to Paris in 1947, where he assumed the name Zao. He worked across a diversity of media, experimenting with oil on canvas, watercolours, ink on paper, lithography, and engraving. Throughout the course of his career, his work was concerned with capturing the elemental forces of nature.
Zao grew up in Nantung, a small town north of Shanghai. He began drawing at the age of ten with encouragement from his father and his grandfather, who taught him how to draw the characters of the Chinese alphabet. At the age of 15, Zao began studying at the Hangzhou Fine Arts School under Lin Fengmian and other artists. During his six years at the school, his work was mainly figurative. He was influenced by traditional Chinese and Japanese art, as well as the work of Western painters, namely Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. After graduating in 1941, Zao had his first exhibition in Chongqing.
In 1947, Zao moved to Paris and settled in the avant-garde neighbourhood of Montparnasse. With Alberto Giacometti for a neighbour, Zao quickly befriended many artists and writers in Paris at the time, such as Sam Francis, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Pierre Soulages, among others. His first exhibition came quickly, hosted in 1949 at the Galerie Creuze.
In 1951, Zao was introduced to the work of Paul Klee which inspired him to move towards abstraction. Zao would later visit New York City for the first time in 1957 where he met many Abstract Expressionists. By 1959, his shift to abstraction was heavily pronounced and was exemplified by the fact he was now naming his paintings after the year they were completed to limit ascribing any visual associations.
Throughout the 1960s, Zao’s work grew in scale as he began to take on multi-panel compositions. Zao often incorporated Chinese influences into his work beginning in the mid-1950s. He would use calligraphy rather than brush strokes, and in 1971 he began using the Chinese brush-and-ink technique. These approaches reflected Zao’s background in Chinese art traditions while maintaining his conceptual roots in Western abstraction.
Zao was a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, he was awarded the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale Award for Painting in 1994, and in 2006, he was inducted into the Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur. His work has been exhibited internationally, and it can be found in over 150 public collections across more than 20 countries. His work is held in major institutions such as the Tate Gallery, London, UK, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among others. Zao passed away at his home in Nyon, Switzerland, in 2013.