Zao Wou-Ki was a Chinese-born painter, born in Beijing in 1920, who moved to Paris in 1948 and died in Switzerland in 2013.
He became one of the best known abstract painters of the twentieth century, with huge canvases that borrow from Chinese calligraphy and landscape as much as from European modernism. His name means no limits. In 2018 one of his paintings sold in Hong Kong for about 65 million US dollars.
His father, a banker, gave him the name Wou-Ki. It promises a life without boundaries, and Zao spent his career being asked which side of the boundary he stood on, China or the West.
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The name fit the biography. In 1948 he left China for Paris, became a French citizen, and in 2002 entered the French Academy of Fine Arts. On his canvases he put no titles at all, only dates, so that nothing would tell a viewer what to look at.
Yet he never believed he had left anything behind. In an interview in the early 1960s he put it plainly: "Everybody is bound by a tradition, I am bound by two."
What he found strange was where the second tradition caught up with him. "It is to Paris," he said, "that I owe this return to my deepest origins." The way back to China, for Zao Wou-Ki, went through Paris.
What You'll Discover
Where he spent his first afternoon.
Who wrote poems for his prints.
What ancient bones did to his brush.
Why his canvases carry only dates.
How he found China again.
What one canvas sold for in 2018.