PROVENANCE:
Cadby Birch Gallery, New York

EXHIBITED:
Zao Wou-ki Solo Exhibition, Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei, December 12, 2009-January, 17, 2010

With his father’s support, in 1948 and at the age of 27, Zao Wou-ki sailed from Shanghai, China to the capital of the art world, Paris, to study fine arts. This trip to a foreign country where he didn’t know the language was a miracle to him. Within two or three years, Zao had not only visited numerous famous museums to view the masterpieces housed there but had also become accustomed to life in Paris. Once his talents were recognized and he could start to make a living selling his own paintings, he was able to take a break from painting and embark on artistic journeys to broaden his horizons. In 1951, he attended the opening of his own solo copperplate engravings, exhibition in Switzerland. There, he saw Paul Klee’s paintings in a gallery and discovered the great space existing within Klee’s tiny symbols, a feature with a strong similarity to Chinese paintings. Later, he visited Italy and Spain. He was so impressed by the scenery of Tuscany that he praised it as resembling the scenery of the southern river towns of the Jiangnan region of China.

Zao observed the classical churches, mural art and historical architecture in many European cities and applied this in the composition and arrangement of objects in his paintings. The distinctive hues and vibrant imagination of the Mediterranean area were a source of inspiration in his later landscape paintings. The trip to southern Europe was of great significance to Zao, in that after this he re-discovered China and entered his “Klee Period”. On his return to Paris he began to create paintings infused with scenery, architecture, and nature.

Classical and mysterious, the oil painting “Mars, 52” is a representative piece of Zao’s Klee Period, completed in the spring of 1952 after his trip to Europe. In this carnival-like world, we see numerous sailboats sailing to and fro on the southern European seas. Zao used simple black lines and brush strokes to make the images in this piece symbolic and abstract and employed fixed points scattered to create multiple spatial layers. Moreover, he applied calligraphic-like lines and rich orange, red, gold hues to illustrate images from his trip and to create the mysterious tones of an ancient city.

With the multiple layers of space presented within planar perspectives, art critics consider Zao’s paintings poetic. Zao, an avid reader of Tang and Song poetry and the Confucian Analects, and a practitioner of calligraphy since his early childhood, naturally had a deep understanding of landscape and imagery in both poems and pictures, in particular since poetry and painting are often merged in Chinese art. His deep understanding of Chinese classical literature was thus naturally revealed in his paintings. Li Bai, a great poet in the Tang Dynasty, famously wrote: “West of the Yellow Crane Tower to an old pal I say goodbye. / He leaves for Yangzhou in mid-spring when flower petals fly. / The shadow of his lonely sail gradually fades into the blue sky, / Until I can only see the Yangzi River from heaven rumbling by.” This poem illustrates the beautiful blossom scenery of late spring, when the poet visited the southern water towns of Jiangnan. Just as the Tang poets praised Yangzhou, and the southern water towns of Jiangnan were the main theme of Song poetry, Zao was searching for China in his landscape painting on his artistic voyage to Europe.

The poet and art critic, Henri Michaux, wrote in the catalogue preface for Zao’s first solo exhibition in New York in 1952, Showing while concealing, breaking down and making the lines shake, tracing, wandering, walking detours and squiggles with a dreamer's spirit, this is what Zao Wou-ki likes and suddenly, with the same festive air which animates the Chinese countryside and towns, the painting appears quivering, joyous and a little amusing with an orchard of signs. (Zao Wou-ki & Francoise Marquet, Zao Wou-ki Autoportrait, editions Fayard, 1988 pp. 102-103) Henri Michaux thought that Zao’s paintings are not actually about scenery, but about nature. His early works carried profound and mysterious feelings reminiscent of the atmosphere at Chinese festivals. Michaux’s comments fully reflect the artist’s thoughts. As a poet, he could better comprehend the meaning conveyed in his painting by Zao. These two artists recognized and appreciated each other throughout their lives.

Around 1950, the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, whose studio was next to Zao’s, mentioned his appreciation of the concrete, unveiled elements of Zao's paintings, saying that “it is a trembling squiggly quotation”. Behind the “trembling squiggly quotation” in Zao’s paintings is a poetic space, while the thin silhouettes in Zao’s early realistic paintings are a kind of homage to his friend Alberto Giacometti.

Drawing inspiration from Klee’s paintings, Zao composed poetic beauty within an abstract framework. He was aware that a new perspective of painting should be created. “Painting should allow people to see the world in a different way, to see it from the perspective of a painter.” Therefore, his delicate narrative style gradually became his classic Oracle Bones Period and then the later abstract expressionist period. This spectacular auction item, “Mars, 52”, completed in the Klee Period, marks the turning point of Zao’s early work. In it Zao not only contemplates the connection between the universe and Man and philosophies of life but also explores the significance of abstract paintings. The artist’s true grace and confidence is fully realized in the poetically magnificent “Mars, 52”.

Both spaces in the universe, the sea and the earth, give birth to everything in nature. In the eyes of a poet or a painter, the sea suggests imagery of being expansive, mysterious, insecure, inclusive, and sustainable, while the earth symbolizes home, closeness, stability, trees and grass, mountains and rocks. The sea and the earth share a mutual dependency between the virtual and the real, yin and yang. Zao was skilled in employing Chinese contemplative perspective in combination with Western sacred and serene lighting to create a seemingly virtual and empty but actually abundant impressionistic painting. The formation of the universe, the connection between the virtual and the real, are different layers within people’s living spaces. The subject about the virtual and the real is a pivotal issue in abstract painting, echoing the creation of an artistic conception in Chinese ink painting. This is also Zao’s ultimate concern in abstract painting. Throughout his life, he had been devoted to create “a space of mutual emergence between the virtual and the real,” a wonderland full of imagination. He rendered balanced and harmonious aesthetics in his paintings, leaving the world beautiful artistic treasures.