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Zao Wou-ki departed for his new home in France at the precise moment when thepainters of the European abstract and American abstract expressionist schoolsbegan to flourish. Zao began producing abstract works himself around 1954,employing symbols and motifs with a mysterious eastern ambiance that float amidthe spaces and shifting tonalities of his paintings, suggesting ancient oracle-bone inscriptions or the patterns on bronze tripods. Zao's work utilizing suchthemes and images first began attracting widespread attention in the mid-1950s, asthe West acknowledged Zao's Chinese background while also beginning to sense hisbroader appeal. Zao's symbolic motifs would later gradually disappear, to bereplaced by large areas of color applied with free brushwork. During this laterphase, Zao created a number of works on the theme of "the four elements." Theseinclude his 1954 Wind, the 1956 Wind and Dust, and Fire from the 1954-55 period.Appearing at sale for the first time, Zao's Et la terre était sans forme , belongsto the "earth" segment of this "earth, air, fire, and water" series.The Chinese culture and its use of pictographic characters had ideas similar tothe ancient notion of "the four elements," the inspiration for Zao's Et la terreétait sans forme. In the Eastern Han period, Xu Shen (c. 58-147) wrote an"Analysis of Chinese Characters" that explained their structures by means of thefive elements of nature, as well as Ying-Yang dualism and the Zhou Dynasty Book ofChanges. The five elements, in Chinese thinking, reflected the seasons: Spring,when trees and grass grow, became "wood"; summer's hot sun became "fire"; theharvests of the fall with their gold became "metal"; the frozen waters of winterwere "water." The seasons themselves and their transitions were "earth." Thetheory of the five elements in China therefore holds that everything in theuniverse is formed from by movements and changes in the elements of wood, water,earth, metal, and fire. Those elements originated in the four seasons, whichthemselves reflect the motion of the universe, and taken as a whole, the "fiveelements" theory describes the structures and the movements of all things. If theChinese theory of Yin and Yang was an ancient way of unifying opposing forces, thefive elements can be seen as a kind of primitive "general systems theory." Zao'swork here uses five fundamental colors, blue, red, yellow, white, and black, toexpress the appearance of the primal earth; the five tones represent the deepblue-green of woods, the red of blood, the yellows of the earth, and the black andwhite of day and night. These five colors, red, yellow, and blue plus black andwhite, are the original, primary colors, and in orthodox Chinese thought, they are"cardinal colors." They represent north, south, east, west, and center as well asthe five elements and their extension in the "ten heavenly stems" of the Chinesesystem of historical dates and numerology.In the 1950s Zao began adding images of the ancient oracle-bone inscriptions tohis impressionistic spaces, melding the forms of western painting and thetradition of the East at a basic level. Such ancient inscriptions are basic to theabstract structure his Et la terre était sans forme. The early totemistic symbolsthat became Chinese pictographic characters have a life and an aesthetic appeal oftheir own. Xu Shen's "Analysis of Characters" describes how those pictographs"drew the object, twisting to follow its form," which is to say, the basicoutlines of objects were captured in the simple brushstrokes that become Chinesecharacters, which depict the entire object or a representative part of it from aparticular angle. The Chinese have an age-old tradition of adding writtencharacters to paintings, which Zao continues in this work in a fresh medium. Thisidea has had parallels in other cultures, in some Islamic societies for example,which because of their prohibition of idols and images, used text and charactersas the medium for conveying spiritual insights. That gave written characters aspecial standing in their cultures, and their painting techniques were based onelegant variations of written characters, which developed rich and complex forms.Calligraphy was used in copying manuscripts and also became an important featureof their architecture and other ornamentations. In Europe, copying religious
 
writings also encouraged the development of handwritten characters, but followingthe invention and spread of the printing press, calligraphy scripts began to fallinto disuse around the 15th century. Western art thereafter focused its attentionon image, form, color, and light.The early paintings of the Chinese literati, however, often took poems as theircentral inspiration and subordinated the painting's expression to that of the poemin an amalgamated work with a highly poetic atmosphere. Following Wang Wei'screation of the form, Su Dongpo was the first poet to use the term "paintings ofthe intelligentsia" (or "literati paintings"). Those painters sought paintings tocreate a semblance of their subjects and to create strong links between the poeticsubject, the style of calligraphy used in the poem, and the painting's content. SuDongpo was deeply impressed by one of Wang Wei's great poems in the five-characterper line form, "In the Mountains": "White rocks in blue-green fields, sparseleaves of red maple by the jade river; no rain on this mountain road, but damp airthat wets our clothes." Su excitedly noted how "Wang Wei's poem contains apainting; looking at the painting, we see a poem." Zao Wouki, in his own way,melds written characters with the images and compositions of his works. Hiscompositions, however, which go far beyond language, are not expressions of thewritten word, and neither are they conceptual pieces. Once created, they aresimply themselves, with a life of their own.In February 1948, 28-year old Zao Wouki left Shanghai on the ocean liner "Andre LePen"; by strange coincidence, his teacher Lin Fengmian had once boarded this sameold passenger ship on his own journey to France. Zao arrived in Paris 36 dayslater, by way of Marseille, with US$30,000 provided by his father for tuition andexpenses. Zao busied himself learning French, painting, exchanging ideas withartists from around the world, and in general absorbing all the western artisticculture Paris had to offer. In earlier days in China, Zao had copied works by thegreat Cubist Picasso, hardly suspecting that one day he would work in a studio notfar from that master's own studio in southern France. Zao was lucky, too, inenjoying the excellent friendship of painters such as Miro and Matisse, and helater enjoyed cooperation with a gallery operated by Matisse's son. In addition tothat, for 17 years he also worked near the studio of sculptor Alaberto Giacometti.Untitled and Lac de Geneve both date from 1950; few Zao Wouki works from thatearly period are available today. These works feature palettes of soft, elegantcolor with subtle gradations in shading that reveal the influence of great Frenchpainters of Zao's acquaintance: Picasso's structure, Matisse's color, and Miro'sfree imagination each enhance his ability to handle spatial effects with skill andfreedom. Also during 1950s, Zao participated in a Berne exhibition wherediscovered another artist influenced by Chinese culture, Paul Klee. The deepaffinity he felt for the inner spaces portrayed by Klee provided a furtherstimulus for his own art. Klee believed that an artist must let his works movebeyond what is visible to the eye, and that the effect of that kind oftrascendence was fundamental to the artist's inner world. Perhaps for this reason,Zao's glimpse of Klee's work sparked a deep response.On a 1957 trip to the US, Zao spent a period of time in close association withAmerican abstract expressionist artists that would prove to be influential. In theprocess of deepening his awareness of great western art, he continued to unlockthe greatness of eastern culture. While he abandoned the representational elementsof his painting, his work retained an eastern sense of closeness to nature. In thepaintings of Zao Wou-ki, nature appears as a distant, hazy presence, expressed inessence rather than in concrete images or scenic elements; the viewer feels andsenses the universe through their implied meanings. After his 1958 work Nuages,Zao no longer gave names to his works but simply inscribed them with the date oftheir production. In his paintings during the following decade he developed adeeper and more mysterious palette of colors, believing that only color was
 
capable of evoking his feelings, implications, and metaphorical meanings in thekind of limitless flat spaces his canvases create. His works departed ever furtherfrom any sense of narration or depiction and became more direct expressions ofspirit and feeling as his style continued to mature.If Zao had been led to Paris by the dream of developing his artistic ability, itwas also Paris that led him to rediscover China as a fountainhead of his art. Astime went on and his style matured, his works partook more and more of amysterious eastern ambience. They express his sharply intuitive sense of naturewith movements like clouds and flowing water and help us achieve a forgetfulnessof self and a sense of man in union with nature. His paintings are novel andstylistically unique in the way they express eastern aesthetics within a westernabstract form, and in so doing they create a bridge between the cultures of eastand west. Zao once commented that "we all obey some kind of tradition, but I obeythe call of two traditions…Paris had an undeniable influence on my artisticgrowth, but as my gained deeper insights, I also gradually rediscovered China.This return to my own distant source is something I actually owe to Paris." Zaoalso said, "Cezanne helped me understand the Chinese view of nature and regain myidentity as a Chinese artist." Cezanne believed that nothing nature shows us ispermanent, that it all will disappear. But the artist, recording nature's variousqualities and features, must retain a grasp on those elements that are lasting andeternal. Beginning with Cezanne, western artists began to turn from seeking directdepictions of nature and toward expressing the self, and all kinds of formalistschools sprang up and became the mainstream of modern art. Zao possibly feltsimilar influences, as in his works images are expressed in the contrasts of hislines, bright and dark tones, and colors, and the size and scale of objects growout of the correct interactions of different tones. For Zao, painting also doesnot mean blindly reproducing external reality, but searching for harmoniousrelationships.In "An Appraisal of Zao Wou-ki's Paintings," Nobel Prize laureate Gao Xingjianwrote, "Once an artist of achievement finds his own path, then immediately thedebate begins about tradition versus westernization. We can leave that debate forthose who find it meaningful." Zao's works reflect his travels along a path fromdeep enthusiasm for western abstraction and toward a return to the Chinesetradition, a return he made based on his very high philosophical and artisticperspective. Within the rich oil colors he applies with such verve we can loseourselves in a sense of eastern harmony, though his brush quite naturally revealsthe influence of the decades he spent abroad, along with a sense of westernromanticism.Zao also reveals his Chinese background in comments on poetry and painting: "Inthe Chinese tradition, poetry and painting were so connected that the empty spacesin paintings were often filled with verse. I loved poetry as a boy and beganwriting it as soon as I learned my first Chinese characters. Poetry and art areessentially the same as they both express the "chi" of life, whether through theflick of the brush over the painting or the motions of the hand as the characterstake shape on the paper. These movements cannot be reproduced because theyoriginate with us; they reflect our hidden thoughts and the hidden thoughts of theuniverse. Since 1950, I've always agreed whenever a publisher or a poet wants tomake my painting part of such a combination. What I like most in poetry is thefeeling of freedom when every word finds its own place as part of an orderedwhole; the words amble carefree, then stop, turn and take a breath. When we pauseat some point in our reading, that moment is a moment of peace and beauty, justthe same as the spaces in a painting." Zao reflects this point of view everywherein his work: whether in his early representative paintings in a style akin toKlee's, or in the surging, exhilarating works of his later abstract expressioniststyle, the beauty of the poetic conception is always present. The viewer is free
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R A H King

Marvellous - many thanks.

reply02 / 29 / 2008
Reveur

Images of his works can be found at www.christies.com, or www.artnet.com. Enjoy!

reply02 / 28 / 2008
R A H King

How about showing us some of Zao's work?

reply02 / 28 / 2008
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