Zao Wou-Ki is the highest-valued Chinese-born artist in the world. In 2018, a single canvas of his sold for HK$510 million, setting a record for Asian oil painting at auction that still stands. He is celebrated as a leading figure of Western lyrical abstraction, yet the substance of his work never stopped being Chinese. His paintings hang in more than 150 major museums worldwide, and no history of modern art can leave his name out. Last year, 2023, marked the tenth anniversary of his death.
An unprecedented retrospective, "The Path of Wou-Ki: A Centennial Retrospective of Zao Wou-Ki," opened at the China Academy of Art Museum in Hangzhou — the artist's own alma mater. The show took nearly five years to prepare and brought together close to 200 works. Four months after it opened, visitors were still making their way to Hangzhou to see it, tracing a path from his earliest paintings to the last major canvas of his life, watching how this master fused Eastern and Western culture into a single vision.
I went to the museum in Hangzhou more than once, to look closely at the paintings and to talk with the curators. On the first working day of the new year, let's revisit the life of the master Zao Wou-Ki together. Contributing writer: Huang Xirui. Editor: Ye Li. Zao was born into a scholarly family in Beijing, and at just fourteen he tested into the Hangzhou National College of Art — the institution that would eventually become the China Academy of Art. He was no model student: he disliked traditional Chinese ink painting, skipped class, and once, on a final exam, simply smeared a blot of ink onto the paper and handed it to his ink-painting teacher, Pan Tianshou. Pan was furious, and Zao nearly got expelled.
In the end, two teachers who had studied in Europe, Lin Fengmian and Wu Dayu, intervened on his behalf, and he was allowed to stay. At twenty, he stayed on at the school to teach. Lin Fengmian (second from left), Xie Jinglan (center), and Zao Wou-Ki (far right), Hangzhou, 1946. Zao Wou-Ki, "Lanlan," 1935. It was also at the Hangzhou academy that he met his first wife, Xie Jinglan, who came from a similarly bookish family. Zao's first oil portrait was of his fifteen-year-old sweetheart — "Lanlan."
Zao Wou-Ki, "Still Life with Apples," 1935–36. This is where the exhibition's first section, "Two Traditions," picks up the story.
The "two traditions" are, on one hand, Chinese culture, and on the other, the color and pictorial ideas Zao absorbed from Western modernist painters — Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso. A work on view from 1935, "Still Life with Apples," makes the debt to Cézanne especially plain. Zao Wou-Ki, "Untitled (Temple and Tomb)," 1947. Zao Wou-Ki, "My Home in Hangzhou," 1947. The curator Yu Xuhong describes West Lake, in Hangzhou, as a scene that lodged itself permanently in Zao's imagination — a place his art kept returning to.
Even after he decided, in 1948, to leave for France, he was still painting Hangzhou from memory.
"He received a thoroughly traditional Chinese education — the Four Books and Five Classics, Tang poetry, Song lyrics, all read from childhood — and these nourished his art for the rest of his life. Traces of that life in China, the things he kept looking back on from memory, show up in his work alongside pieces with an obviously Western modernist sensibility, like 'My Home in Hangzhou,' which is on view here." Xie Jinglan aboard the liner André Lebon, en route to France, 1948. Zao Wou-Ki (standing, center) with artist and dealer friends at Galerie Pierre, Paris, 1950. Left: Paul Klee, "Wald Bau," 1919; right: Zao Wou-Ki, "Green Forest," 1950. On February 26, 1948, Zao and his wife Xie Jinglan left Shanghai by ocean liner and reached France after a thirty-six-day crossing.
The couple's talent got them into the Paris art world almost immediately, and they came to know Matisse, Cézanne, and other figures of what is called the School of Paris. Picasso liked to call him "the little Chinese man," and he counted Giacometti, Joan Miró, and Joan Mitchell among his friends. The influence of these Paris painters shows clearly in his early work made in France. Zao Wou-Ki, "Festive Village," 1954. Zao Wou-Ki, "20.12.49 – Yellow Landscape," 1954. In the 1950s, he saw original works by Paul Klee in Switzerland, and the blocks and lines and signs in Klee's paintings stirred childhood memories of traditional Chinese culture.
He noticed a startling resemblance between abstract lines and squares and the oracle-bone script and bronze inscriptions of ancient China, and he began building forms out of imagined script, constructing space out of invented characters. Zao Wou-Ki, "The Beginning of October," 1955. Zao Wou-Ki, "Chinese City," 1955. Even though he was working in oil paint, he never fully left Chinese tradition behind — he often painted with a large Chinese brush, laying the brush on its side for planes of color and lifting it up for lines, moving fluidly between the two. Zao Wou-Ki, "My Father's Garden," 1955. "My Father's Garden," also in this exhibition, is built primarily out of oracle-bone-script forms, and it marks the start of what's known as his "oracle bone" period.
Gao Shiming, president of the China Academy of Art, argues that it was in this early oracle-bone period that Zao established himself as "a modern painter rooted in Chinese culture."
"Zao's oracle-bone series carries something of the mood at the very origin of writing itself — the legend of Cangjie inventing characters, when it's said the sky rained millet and ghosts wept in the night, the atmosphere of a world just coming into being." Zao Wou-Ki and Xie Jinglan in his studio, soon after arriving in Paris. Zao Wou-Ki, "Portrait of My Wife," 1949. In their first years in Paris, Zao and Xie Jinglan were, by every account, inseparable, and he painted a deeply tender "Portrait of My Wife." But Xie Jinglan, a gifted woman in her own right, had no intention of staying in her husband's shadow. Drawn to music, she began experimenting with folding Eastern music into Western electronic composition, a small revolution of her own, and through it she met the French composer Marcel — who fell hopelessly in love with her while she was still married to Zao.
Zao Wou-Ki, "The Drowned City," 1956, painted after his divorce, as a way of working through his own pain. The standoff lasted three or four years, and in the end Xie Jinglan chose Marcel, the man who could support her art and her music, leaving Zao in 1956. Her departure plunged him into a grief so deep that "Lanlan" became a name he could no longer say out loud. And yet, even as he was reeling from this emotional blow, Zao's painting opened onto an entirely new chapter.
Untitled, 1965, lithograph, 59.4 × 37.1 cm. Zao Wou-Ki, "03.05.62," 1962. Zao Wou-Ki, "22.07.64," 1964. To ease the pain, Zao traveled to the United States in 1957, where he met the abstract painters Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Their free, unbound approach to Abstract Expressionism completely reshaped his sense of what abstraction could be.
Starting in 1958, he stopped titling his paintings altogether and began naming them instead for the date they were finished, gradually working his way free of the oracle-bone imagery and characters that had defined his earlier abstraction, throwing himself into a period of sweeping, unrestrained brushwork — what's called his "wild cursive" period. Zao Wou-Ki in his Paris studio. "29.09.64" (one of the signature works of this transition) alongside an earlier version, "21.09.64," 1964, photographed by Budd. Zao Wou-Ki, "01.12.64," 1964. As Gao Shiming puts it, "those brushstrokes racing across an empty void are a sharp, edged kind of experiment and exploration — this is the Zao Wou-Ki we all recognize."
"The Path of Wou-Ki" exhibition view, China Academy of Art Museum, 2023. Zao Wou-Ki, "09.03.65," 1965. Zao Wou-Ki, "13.02.67," 1967. The years from the late 1950s through the 1960s make up the exhibition's second section, "Convergence." Zao's color grew richer, his canvases larger than before, as if he were throwing his own body into the canvas, wrestling with it physically — and out of that struggle, abstract landscape imagery gradually took shape.
This was also, by most accounts, the golden period of his career, and these works, so full of life, reward close, unhurried looking in person. Chan Mei Kyung and Zao Wou-Ki, 1958. Zao Wou-Ki with Chan Mei Kyung and her daughter from a previous marriage, Zao Shanmei, whom Zao always treated as his own. During that 1958 trip to the United States, Zao passed through Hong Kong and met his second wife, Chan Mei Kyung. He fell instantly for the beautiful, star-crossed actress, and the two married in a whirlwind three months later.
Zao once said of her: "Her face, so perfect, carried something soft and melancholy in it — the glow of a film star, but also the maturity and intelligence of a woman who had lived through hardship beyond her years, and yet she never lost a girl's innocence. She understood my paintings." But beauty, like a flower, can be fragile. Chan's inherited mental illness worsened over the years, and the strain it put on Zao's life left him at times unable to paint at all. In 1972, she took her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills. She was forty-one.
It was, without question, a devastating blow. Zao decided to return from France to Hangzhou, to see his elderly mother after more than twenty years apart, and to visit old friends. His mother died in 1975, sending him into another period of despair; back in France, he still found himself unable to paint.
"The Path of Wou-Ki" exhibition view, China Academy of Art Museum, 2023. The third section of the show, "A Mirror from Another Mountain," traces Zao's stylistic shift from the 1970s through the 1990s — the entanglement and struggle in his work of this period, and how he found new life by returning to Chinese cultural tradition. Zao Wou-Ki, "Untitled," 1980. Zao Wou-Ki, "Untitled," 1976. He explored every possibility ink could offer: dry, wet, dense, pale, scorched.
A single stroke of black might conceal two entirely different kinds of mark beneath it — a "damp, scorched" black with weight and texture, and a "dry, pale" black, thin and translucent. This uneven rhythm of "blacks of every hue," as it's sometimes described, gives his compositions a deeper sense of layering and texture. Back at the Hangzhou academy, Zao had once been put off by traditional Chinese ink painting and landscape, infatuated instead with Western modernism. Twenty years later, he found his way back to ink by another route, and said plainly: "Calligraphy is the original source of my painting, and its only guide."
"Golden Autumn," 1974, etching, 43.5 × 55.4 cm. Zao Wou-Ki, "23.05.62–07.01.71," 1962–1971. Zao Wou-Ki, "21.02.72," 1972. Beyond the black-and-white ink works, his oil paintings from this period grew more expressive too, and often seemed to stand for time passing, dissolving. Spurred on by his trip back to Hangzhou and the sight of his homeland's mountains and rivers again, his oils became fluid, unrestrained, sweeping in scale — like splashed-ink Chinese landscape painting rendered in oil.
Zao Wou-Ki, "15.01.82," 1982. He also worked in triptych form to render the view of West Lake so familiar to Chinese audiences. From the 1970s on, the last four decades of Zao's life came to be known as his "Wou-Ki" period — the very name this exhibition takes its title from. In this stage, he truly fused West and East, force and stillness, internalizing them into an inexhaustible creative energy. In these paintings we can read the mountains and rivers, the mist and cloud, that literati painters chased for centuries — and even though his method could not look more Western, he had, in fact, arrived at something close to the literal meaning of the exhibition's title: a path without limit.
"The Path of Wou-Ki" exhibition view, China Academy of Art Museum, 2023. Zao Wou-Ki, "Homage to My Friend Henri Michaux," 1999–2000. During his lowest point, there were stretches when he could barely finish a single painting; he started again with small ink works, and found crucial encouragement along the way. That encouragement came from Henri Michaux, who kept urging Zao to return to Chinese cultural tradition.
In the exhibition's last large gallery of oil paintings, "Boundless Vitality," devoted to Zao's work after 2000, "Homage to Henri Michaux" occupies the center of the room. The color here is noticeably brighter and more saturated, the handling looser and freer. As the curator put it, this is where visitors can best feel the artist's late-life conviction that painting is a form of happiness — his embrace of a new world, and his own particular hope for what lay ahead.
Zao Wou-Ki and his third wife, Françoise Marquet. It was also in this period that he met his third wife, the Frenchwoman Françoise Marquet, then an intern at a Paris museum; the two married in 1977. Unlike the two wives before her, whom Zao had loved to the point of obsession, Françoise took on more the role of Zao's manager and champion, guiding him toward his status as a world-class master.
Zao Wou-Ki, "18.03.2008," 2008. In this stage of his life, Zao was preoccupied with a different question: how do you paint what can't be seen? How do you paint wind, or emptiness, or light, or memory and feeling? Perhaps the answer lies in another especially significant work in this gallery — the last major painting of Zao's life. As the curator Yu Xuhong put it, "Looking at '18 March 2008,' you can sense that at the very end of his life, he seemed to have returned to childhood — the movement of air across a calm lake, the instant a breeze passes through willow branches. Through these images, he was reaching for that particular Chinese idea of emptiness, an expression of 'seeing what cannot be seen.'"
"The Path of Wou-Ki" exhibition view, China Academy of Art Museum, 2023. Zao Wou-Ki demonstrating for students at the Zao Wou-Ki painting workshop, 1985, photographed by Li Jiang. Zao Wou-Ki died in Switzerland in 2013, at the age of ninety-two. Walking through the full exhibition, it feels as though his own work has rewritten his story for him — letting us live through the great sorrows and great joys of his life, the turns and returns of his art, and the steadiness with which he held on to who he was at the start.
More than that, he shows us a new kind of possibility: that out of the oldest, most distant reaches of Chinese tradition, a modern art could grow and bloom that moves people the world over. Installation photography courtesy of the China Academy of Art Museum.