Zao Wou-Ki: The Complete Story
Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013) was the Chinese-French painter who arrived in Paris in 1948, pushed through Klee and ancient bronze script into pure abstraction, and became the bridge between Chinese ink and Western oil that both sides claim.
His name, Wou-Ki, means no limits. He spent sixty years earning it.
Zao Wou-Ki at a glance
1920. Born in Beijing to a banker’s family that traced its line back to the Song dynasty.
1935. Entered the Hangzhou School of Fine Arts at fifteen.
1948. Sailed for Paris and visited the Louvre on the day he arrived.
1951. Saw Paul Klee’s work in Switzerland, the push that carried him into abstraction.
2013. Died in Switzerland at 93, by then the most sought after Chinese born painter at auction.
From Beijing to a Paris studio
Born in Beijing in 1920 to a cultivated banking family, he trained and then taught at the Hangzhou National Academy of Art, one of China's great modern art schools. In 1948 he sailed for Paris, moved into a studio in Montparnasse, and reportedly waited years before daring to paint a Chinese brushstroke in oil, so determined was he not to be exotic.
The oracle bones
The turn came in the mid 1950s: he began painting signs drawn from oracle bone script, the oldest Chinese writing, floating in fields of colour. From there the signs dissolved entirely, and by the 1960s his canvases were storms of light and ink-dark pigment, abstraction with the space and breath of Song dynasty landscape.
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Klee, the permission slip
In 1951, in Bern, Zao stood in front of Paul Klee’s small paintings and saw signs floating free of things.
He later said Klee showed him a door back into Chinese space by way of the West.
Within three years the boats and villages in his work dissolved into marks.
The poet who read his stones
In 1949 the poet Henri Michaux saw eight of Zao’s lithographs and wrote poems to accompany them.
The book sealed a forty year friendship between two immigrants of the French language.
Michaux kept pushing him toward freedom, and Zao kept painting it.
The ink he had refused
For decades Zao avoided Chinese ink, afraid Paris would file him under exotic goods.
In 1971, while his wife May was gravely ill, Michaux urged him to try again. The ink poured out.
The late ink works now hang beside the oils, two languages from one hand.
The myth to retire
The lazy version says he abandoned China for Western abstraction. He said the opposite: Paris is what sent him back. Everybody is bound by a tradition, he observed, and he was bound by two. From the 1970s he returned openly to ink painting, and his late triptychs read as Chinese landscapes with the objects removed.
The 65 million dollar triptych
Recognition came on both continents: French citizenship in 1964, a seat in the Academie des Beaux-Arts in 2002, and a record that stunned even Hong Kong. In 2018 his 1985 triptych Juin-Octobre, ten metres wide, sold at Sotheby's Hong Kong for around 65 million dollars, then the most expensive work ever auctioned in Asia.
Where to see Zao Wou-Ki
Paris holds him best: the Centre Pompidou and the Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris, which drew crowds with its 2018 retrospective, L'espace est silence. In Asia, M+ in Hong Kong shows him, and the Fondation Zao Wou-Ki in Geneva keeps the archive.
The Zao Wou-Ki questions that keep coming up
What is Zao Wou-Ki famous for? Luminous large-scale abstractions fusing Chinese ink tradition with Western oil painting.
What does his name mean? Wou-Ki means no limits, a name he grew into.
How much do his paintings sell for? His triptych Juin-Octobre 1985 fetched around 65 million dollars in Hong Kong in 2018.
Where can I see his work? The Pompidou and the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris, M+ in Hong Kong, and major museums worldwide.
Why did Zao Wou-Ki avoid ink painting for decades? He feared being filed under chinoiserie in Paris. He returned to ink in 1971 at the urging of his friend, the poet Henri Michaux.
What did Zao Wou-Ki do on his first day in Paris? He landed in April 1948 and went straight to the Louvre the same afternoon.
More secrets to unlock
Storms with no armies in them
The boy who left Hangzhou in 1948 ended up in the French Academy under the dome of the Institut de France, elected in 2002, painting storms with no armies in them.
