Zao Wou-ki's accomplishments as an artist are widely recognized. He is a Member of the Académie des beaux-arts, which is the highest honor that can be bestowed on an artist in France, and all leading art museums have examples of his work in their collections. Any discussion of modern abstract art (whether Western or Asian) must make reference to Zao Wou-ki. Zao's success on the international art scene encouraged many younger Chinese artists to explore the possibilities presented by abstract art, and he has come to be seen as the father of lyrical abstract art. Philippe Dagen, the art critic of Le Monde, once described Zao Wou-ki as a "vagabond" artist, in reference to the struggle that Zao underwent to establish himself as a Chinese artist within Western art circles.
Having established himself in France, Zao Wou-ki's early work was very much Western in style, but over time he began to turn towards a more Chinese approach. Whereas Zao's early paintings are characterized by very dense composition, his later work has an airy, spiritual feel. Zao has said that it is easy to fill up a canvas, but not so easy to leave large areas of the canvas blank. Having dedicated more or less his whole life to art, Zao Wou-ki gained a high level of mastery over various different artistic media, enabling him to express himself freely in all of them, and to achieve a state of "return to original inner truth" and "activation of spiritual energy." During the many years in which he sought for ultimate truth in his paintings, Zao Wou-ki simplified both his Chinese and French signatures on his works, preferring to dedicate the space to color and composition. His brush moves freely over the canvas as his spirit guides it, sometimes fast and sometimes slow. The overall effect is one of calm self-assurance; in every inch of the canvas, one can see the artist's casual yet refined bearing exemplified.
From the 1980s onwards, there was a pronounced change in Zao Wou-ki's painting style, with an added element of warmth and luster. Works such as "4.4.85" (a large oil painting which Zao produced in 1985) and "Hommage à Henri Matisse" from 1986 incorporate more conceptual elements from Chinese ink brush painting, and are a testimony to the breadth of the artist's vision. With the passage of time and the transformation of Zao's own vision, by the late 1990s his work was becoming characterized by a more limited use of oils, even more masterly deployment of color, and a sense of lightness and "permeability." In these works, Zao is exploring the spiritual spaces of eternity.
In the new millennium, Zao Wou-ki has continued to produce large-scale canvases, some of them taking the form of huge double- or even triple-screen works, which display an enhanced use of color. In 2004, an exhibition of Zao Wou-ki's work entitled "Hommages" was held at the Musée Fabre, Montpellier; this exhibition included of the large-scale paintings (including screen paintings) that Wou had created as homage to his artistic mentors, old friends (some of them deceased) and lovers; these works attracted a great deal of interest. Many of the works on show had been completed since the year 2000. The works that attracted the most attention were two three-screen paintings: "Hommage à Jean-Paul Riopelle - 21.06.2003" and "Hommage à Françoise - 23.10.2003." Since then, Zao has continued to create large-scale canvases, including "Hommage à Cézanne - 06.11.2005," which was completed in 2005, and "Hommage à Jean - 15.04.2006," completed in 2006. Despite his advanced age, Zao's work shows no loss of self-assurance; if anything, his brushwork has become even bolder and more unrestrained.
At the age of 80, Zao Wou-ki said: "Old age and death can never scare me. As long as I can hold the brush and paint the cloth, nothing will scare me. My only hope is to complete the painting on hand and this painting is braver and more liberal than the last one." For as long as he can still paint, Zao will continue to paint in earnest.
Art critic Daniel Abadie has served as exhibition curator at the Musée National d'Art Moderne and as director of the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume. He feels that many people tend to concentrate too much on an artist's early work, assuming that later work just constitutes a re-hash of work the artist did when they were younger. Abadie uses the example of Picasso to show just how ludicrous this attitude is. When an exhibition of Picasso's later work was held at Avignon in 1970, the intellectuals of the time criticized the paintings as being tired and formulaic. And yet these same paintings inspired the neo-expressionist movement of the early 1980s, making Picasso the forerunner of these avant-garde artists. Today, several decades on, Picasso's later paintings are viewed as constituting some of the most important works of art produced in the twentieth century.
In his appraisal of the work that Zao Wou-ki has produced since the year 2000, Abadie notes that "In recent years, and perhaps because he has nothing to prove to anybody anymore, he has taken the luxury of taking every possible risk, and to come up with the most unexpected solutions to complete a painting. Even the composition is sometimes unexpected. Of course, he does not succeed every time, but when he does, the result is very powerful. This freedom has been a driving force in the latter part of his life. This desire to put himself back in a challenging position, to take risks, although he has already achieved everything, is the aspect I most appreciate in an artist's career. What is fascinating in Zao Wou-ki's recent work is that he is painting as he never painted before. He knows how to paint, but nevertheless he constantly keeps reinventing painting."
This particular painting, "19.02.2005," is a large, banner-like work that Zao Wou-ki completed in 2005. The colors used are mostly lighter tones of blue, purple, brown, red and orange, creating a resplendent, joyful effect. Like Zao Wou-ki's other later works, "19.02.2005" embodies the artist's strong emotion and contemplative reflection; in particular, it brings to mind "Hommage à Françoise - 23.10.2003," a 2003 work that Zao dedicated to his wife. "19.02.2005" makes extensive use of soft, almost invisible thread-like lines, and of the type of texturing method commonly seen in traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy. The emotive significance of this painting is dramatically different from the intense sensibility that characterized so much of Zao's work in the 1960s; what Zao is seeking to express here has an additional sense of warmth and spirituality, and a gentle recalling of memories of nature from the artist's youth.
From 1958 onwards, Zao Wou-ki ceased to give explanatory titles to his abstract paintings; with the exception of a handful of paintings dedicated to a particular individual, almost all of his work after that time used the date of completion as the painting's title. However, starting around the year 2000, Zao Wou-ki became less insistent on this practice; he ceased to worry that giving titles to his abstract paintings would restrict the viewer's ability to appreciate them fully. In addition, in 2004 Zao began to produce figurative art again, something he had abandoned in 1954. Several of Zao's recent paintings have thus been given titles, such as "Erabe rouge," "Paysage - Histoire sur montagnes," and "Orchidée." By the time "Le Temple des Hans" was painted, the symbolic meaning of the paintings was being made more and more transparent, and the paintings themselves were starting to bear a strong resemblance to figurative or representational art.
While "19.02.2005" has the date of completion as its title, the use of symbols in the painting is more concrete and precise than in much of Zao Wou-ki's previous work. This is a rich, abstract composition, bringing to mind a large garden filled with flowers in full bloom. The bright, beautiful colors exude a spring-like vigor and energy. Zao has always excelled at the depiction of transformation in coloration and in the presentation of a poetic, lyrical atmosphere. Here, he successfully fuses the essential elements of Chinese and Western art to create a masterpiece of his own unique abstract expressionist style. In this work, Zao employs a huge, spreading, gorgeous scene and free, unconstrained lines to portray the gently flowing rhythmic pulse of nature. Appreciation of the beauty of life is expressed to the utmost in a painting that is full of heartfelt emotion, and in which the artist boldly and self-assuredly explores the unconstrained realms of his imagination.
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