Zao Wou-Ki

Zao Wou-ki (Beijing 1921) studied traditional painting and oil painting at the Hangzhou Institute. After spending some time as a drawing teacher in his native China, he travelled to France in 1948, and it was in Paris that he completed his discovery of Western art through the practice of engraving, in which he freely employed ideograms as non-figurative signs. His paintings were at first influenced by Klee, Picasso and Matisse. The fifties marked a turning-point in his work. Zao Wou-ki progressively turned to abstraction, where he found a way of reconciling the contradictions inherent in the culture from which he came and the individualistic creation characteristic of Western art. His evocations of “landscapes” tell of an inner world, the surface of the canvas becomes an agitated area of waves and reliefs, scrabbled by brushstrokes and rapid marks. Harmony is established somewhere between empty and full, near and far, static and dynamic. In his painting, chromaticism attains rare subtleties, even in his large ink drawings on paper of the late eighties, in which the whole range of colours seems to be included, as in an open space between black and white. This selective exhibition presents some sixty paintings and ten drawings made between 1948 and 2000, which have come from museums in France, Germany and Russia and private collections.