PROVENANCE:

Galerie de France, Paris

Private collection, France

ILLUSTRATED:

Jean Leymarie, Zao Wou-ki, Editions Cercle d'Art, Paris, 1986, black-and-white illustrated, no. 528, p. 350

An enigmatic mystery, a chant from a distant land. When we bathe in the joyful tranquility of Zao Wou-ki's paintings, that world always sends our thoughts roaming afar. When standing in that elegant, profound, warm, dreamlike space, people forget what day it is.

Zao Wou-ki's paintings speak of the timelessness of the mountains, the vastness of the sky and the tenderness of the water, depicting the infinite emotions and capacity concealed within nature. When we gaze at one of his paintings, it gradually becomes as if we are a towering mountain, a floating cloud, or an elegant flower floating on a crystalline lake.

In the 1980s, Zao Wou-ki's abstract paintings reached new heights, taking on an air of lyricism. Zao once said, "Filling a painting is easy; emptying one is hard!" As a man enters his mature phase, he can calmly and confidently face the canvas. He is no longer in an agitated warrior's stance, with lines, colors and lighting as his weapons. The painting of this time is the space of his life. He lives and experiences things from inside, and the viewer can enter freely into his painted world.

Looking back over his creative trajectory, Zao was gradually able to penetrate and comprehend the poetry of tranquility. He once said that he hoped to be able to create a painting that appeared empty. The concept in traditional Chinese painting of "treating white as black" meant that the white spaces left where no ink had touched the paper could directly present the concept of emptiness. Western oil paintings usually consist of many layers of colors, with the canvas always full. In that case, how does one paint "emptiness?" That is a completely different concept. Hailing from the East, Zao Wou-ki draws from both Chinese and western traditions, so that he is able to freely apply the colors and lighting of oils, but also able to escape the limitations of the sense of bulk and heaviness inherent to oil paints. Through careful layering, he attained a transparent, lucent sense of lightness. Zao Wou-ki draws from the advantages of the two traditions and a rich life experience to create alluring works of art.

Zao Wou-ki's oil painting "17.9.80" is a fine example of the artist's ability to vividly express penetrating lyricism. It is neither depictive nor abstract, leaving everything to the viewer's imagination. The center appears to depict a mountain shrouded in mist, or perhaps a sandbar on a rainy day. It calls to mind the distant ink mountains from the classic Yuan dynasty painting "Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains" by Huang Gongwang. In "17.9.80", the oil colors are lightly and carefully spread with elegance, recalling the lyricism of eastern ink landscape paintings. The riotous colors and their delicate layering attain a richness that is hard to grasp in ink. This is one of the most highly praised aspects of Zao Wou-ki's art.

Zao Wou-ki deftly fused Chinese conceptual perspective with sacred western lighting to complete an apparently empty but actually quite imaginatively supple freehand painting. The interplay between emptiness and substance is a different level of the living space. Emptiness and substance are crucial to abstract painting, corresponding to the conceptual creativity of Chinese ink landscapes. This is a subject that has always been near to Zao's heart. He has always strived to create a "sense of space between emptiness and substance" in oil color, to form an infinitely imaginative realm and bestow it with the beauty of balance and harmony. The "minimalist" style presented in the work "17.9.80" is highly thought-provoking and alluring. The mountains that flow from Zao Wou-ki's brush are vast and endless.