EXHIBITED:

Zao Wou-ki, Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo, October 6-31, 1987

ILLUSTRATED:

Jean Leymarie, Zao Wou-ki, Editions Cercle d'Art, Paris, 1986, black-and-white illustrated, no. 574, p. 355

Zao Wou-ki, Fuji Television Gallery Co., Tokyo, 1987, illustrated, no. 5

Pierre Daix, Zao Wou-ki, l'oeuve 1935-1993, Ides et Calendes, Berne, 1994, color illustrated, p. 144

"I want my compositions to be pure and simple, with an emphasis on space and spatial relations. It is this kind of lucid quality I'm looking for." This quote by the artist is one piece of evidence that as he matured as a painter, Zao Wou-ki's attitude mellowed considerably—his later works are permeated with a relaxed elegance, reflecting a broadness of mind and spontaneity of approach that only come with decades of painterly experience. Zao's prevailing style since the 1980s, put in a nutshell, is marked by the gradual transition from emotiveness to spatiality.

During a highly illuminating dialogue with the artist, the prominent poet and academic Wai-lim Yip noted how Zao's late work showed a marked tendency towards the unrestrained and abstracted beauty of "emptiness." Zao replied, "Yes, but this 'emptiness' is the result of much hard work. It's easy to fill up the canvas, but hard to empty it. In traditional Chinese painting, the artist is helped by the medium, ink and rice paper. He can leave certain spaces blank by simply not applying any ink, or diluting it a lot, and the paper's texture does the rest. But in oil paintings—at least in my oil paintings—a substantial effort is necessary to achieve the same effect. You have to build this 'emptiness,' construct every 'void' with careful deliberation, and the bigger the canvas, the more difficult the task. Some modern painters use the traditional Chinese liubai approach I just mentioned: just leave blank spaces and be done with it. To me, however, the empty spaces need to be alive, not just 'blank.' I have to animate them with my spirit and live in them, if you like; they have to breathe my innermost experiences. Emptiness and substance are just two sides of the same coin, are intricately interwoven planes of what we call existence. They need each other, and therefore this 'emptiness' never means a hollow void. Rather, it's the essence of our universe." (Wai-lim Yip, Dialogues With Contemporary Artists - Birth and Growth of Chinese Modern Oil Paintings, Tung Ta Book Company, Taipei, December 1987 [first edition], February 1996 [second edition], p. 13) Over his long career, Zao has perfected the process of filling emptiness with import, and his oil paintings are brimming with the undulating rhythms and many-layered textures of ink-and-wash drawings, while at the same time achieving an outstanding splendor and richness of color and light, even and especially in the "empty" spaces of his compositions, that lie beyond the reach of pure ink-and-wash work. This combination of Chinese space and Western color is undoubtedly one of Zao's greatest achievements.

Through his ceuvre, Zao records his life and dreams, and communicates the ideals he pursues. And from his paintings we can also learn much about his emotional and psychological transformations. Since 1980, one finds that age and experience have softened his hard edges and added a note of tranquility and ease to much of his work. The unbridled passion and confrontational impetus of his earlier periods have given way to a placid poise that chimes well with the philosophical lines from Laozi's Daode Jing, "Emptying your mind of all thoughts, you will embrace peaceful harmony." Coming from a literati family, Zao has never denied his Chinese heritage. Yet he is constantly wandering between two worlds, combining Eastern subtlety and restraint with Western boldness and artistic innovation, being especially partial to the dynamic verve of abstract expressionism. Now, however, in his later years he has reached yet another level of aesthetic articulation, with nostalgic contemplation of the transience of things dominating his output. Wielding his brush with a mastery that is both accomplished and intuitive, these days Zao captures the inner beauty of our floating world in expansive and esoteric images that leave endless room for our imagination.

Renowned French art historian and critic Jean Leymarie made the following observations about Zao Wou-ki's post-1980 work, "Steeped in tradition yet stunningly original, Zao blends seemingly discordant elements into perfectly cohesive vistas, primeval and dreamlike, that invite us to reconnect with nature (particularly as portrayed in Chinese landscape painting), to once again feel the furious flow of wild rivers, and catch our breath in awe of towering mountain ranges—or to focus our attention on the microcosmos of a little garden, letting ourselves be touched by slightest tremors of existence." ("Devant l'espace onirique que Zao Wou-ki projette et coordone ataviquement, il nous invite à revivre sur nature, et c'est la vocation même de la peinture chinoise, les sensations éprouvées vraiment devant la coulée des fleuves, le surgissement des collines ou bien à l'intérieur des jardins, frémissants microcosmes.") (Jean Leymarie, Zao Wou -ki, Editions Cercle d'Art, Paris, 1986, p. 48) Being exceptionally familiar with Zao's style, Leymarie compiled a comprehensive catalogue of his most important oil paintings. In this catalogue raisonné, he praises the artist for exploring both the magnificent beauty of matter and the profound sophistication of the human spirit, presenting the viewer with myriads of possibilities that all emanate from his perpetual oscillation between East and West. Leymarie also describes Zao's works as sparkling with energy and mystic potential.

Between 1970 and 1980, much of Zao's output had a distinctively panoramic feel about it, and the spatial arrangement of these landscapes won the appreciation of the late French historian Georges Duby, who wrote, "I feel that nowhere is Zao more intimately connected with his Chinese roots than in his ability to create captivating spaces. Portraying just a small corner of our wide world, he yet manages to encompass the entire universe. By extracting the essential qualities of everything, he is able to accommodate the whole cosmos within the frame of one painting—but of course the frame cannot permanently confine such vastitude. It is like sitting in a yard looking up at the sky!..." (Or, dit-il, c'est bien en ce point, s'agissant de la creation de l'espace, qu'il me semble saisir le lien le plus étroit avec la Chine. Extraire de l'univers une parcelle, et qui pourtant contient l'entire de l'univers, enserrer celui-ci dans un cadre, et qui pourtant ne l'enferme pas. Comme en un jardin...) (ibid) High praise for Zao! One is reminded of what the great Chinese poet and painter Wang Wei once wrote in his poem on the knacks of landscape painting, "A wide vista captured on a small scroll, one picture comprising north, south, east and west. The brush makes the four seasons come alive with enchanting authenticity."

During the 1986 New York exhibition "Zao Wou-ki Paintings from 1980 – 1985" held at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, French art critic François Jacob passed an apt comment on that period's creations, "An outlook that continues to regard all possibilities, it is the origin that existed before the world was formed, it is a road, leading not to the end, but back to its sources, confined within tangibles and intangibles; this is where the paintings by Zao Wou-ki leads us to, a world that has yet to determine its form, still in suspension, hesitating, in its last flight prior to the birth of order...The perpetuality of Zao's paintings lies in their questioning of the world, in their efforts to recreate. Certain paintings depict the furor of origin, the ripples of energy clashing abrasively and the turbulence that occurs before the scenery takes form and shape. Some other paintings display the obstinacy of nebulas, or the birth of light, the invention of water, the first dawn, or beyond the turbulent upheavals of matter, present life indistinctly emerging." (Zao Wou-ki & Françoise Marquet, translated by Liu Li, Autoportrait, Artists' Publications, Taipei, First print 1993, 2nd edition 1996, p. 167) "Un regard encore ouvert à tous les possibles. Un état qui précède le monde. Une route quiconduit, non à l'achèvement, mais à l'origine, aux confines de ce qui n'est pas encore. C'est là que nous entraîne la peinture de Zao Wou-ki, vers un espace qui n'est pas encore déterminé, mais reste en suspens, hésite, plane un dernier instant avant de basculer dans ce qui, plus tard, deviendra un ordre.... Il y a dans la peinture de Zao Wou-ki, une perpétuelle mise en question du monde. Un acharnement à le re-créer. Certaines de ses toiles évoquent la fureur des origins, l'enfantement de la matière par l'énergie, les derniers soubresauts des explosions créatrices. D'autres déploient l'indocilité moqueuse des nébuleuses. Ou la naissance de la lumière. Ou l'invention de l'eau. Ou le premier matin, comme ce merveilleux petit triptyque aux blancs rosés. Et en filigrane, par-delà les convulsions de la matière, comme prête à sourdre, la vie." (Zao Wou-ki & Françoise Marquet, Autoportrait, Fayard, Paris, 1986, pp. 186-187)

Completed in 1984, "8.10.84" is an impressive large painting that was also reproduced in Jean Leymarie's 1986 Zao Wou-ki catalogue raisonné. Subdued orange tones, typical of much of the artist's work from the early 1980s, give the composition an air of sublime grandeur. The pastelly palette is applied with succinct skill and precision, and the contrasting darker and lighter shades, engaging each other—as well as the observer—in an absorbing aesthetic dialogue, create an almost eerie sense of roiling spaces, teeming with infinite possibilities. In terms of shape, size and structure, "8.10.84" is one of Zao's most magnificent and successful large-scale oil paintings. As early back as the 1960s, art dealer Sam Kootz had encouraged the artist to try his hand "grand tableaux," and upon returning from the United States, Zao indeed began to experiment with larger formats, even though these were not very popular in Europe at the time. But Zao loved the new challenges posed by working on a super-sized canvas, the additional demands on physical stamina, mental concentration and painterly focus, and he cherished the opportunity to give rein to his creative urges on such a grand scale. From that time onwards, occasional forays into outsized formats became a fixed part of his artistic MO.

This lot, "8.10.84" (1984), belongs to a string of large format oil paintings that also includes "4.4.85" (1985) and "Hommage à Matisse" (1986), all of which are milestones in the artist's development, excelling at the use of deliberately clean yet evocative palettes to suggest a sea of potentialities. In "8.10.84", the viewer encounters a firmament of truly meteorological proportions, a kaleidoscope of metamorphoses under an ominously lowering cloud of deep shades of brown and black—yet the dark colors do not overwhelm the bright phantasmagoria below, bursting as it is into a multifaceted image of intricately colored and subtly textured bluish peaks swathed in billowing wafts of orange-tinted mists, incessantly rising from the earth. It are the ingeniously applied orange and ginger tones that pull the whole composition together. Redolent of sunlight and cosmic energy, they are delicate intimations of the ancient Chinese view of the universe: we are reminded that we, too, are an integral part of nature, and that all things are essentially one.