b. Beijing, China 1920

d. Nyon, Switzerland 2013

A master of postwar art and the highest-selling Chinese painter of his generation, Zao Wou-Ki applied Modernist art-making techniques to traditional Chinese literati painting. Zao moved to Paris in 1948, rejected his Chinese heritage, and immediately began painting in the style of Paul Klee, whose own style was influenced by Chinese landscape painting. By 1954, the artist had developed a unique style that was marked by contrasting colors and lyrical abstraction and that merged Chinese art, as viewed through the lens of European abstraction, with traditional Chinese landscapes. Zao remained wary of objectively Chinese-influenced art and avoided using ink for much of his career, preferring to work with oil paints in a calligraphic style. Like traditional Chinese landscape painting, Zao’s paintings function as fragments of a larger scene, possessing fluidity, transparency, and a graceful luminosity representative of the artist’s interior energies.

The paintings of Zao’s are part of the permanent collections of leading international museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Tate Gallery London; Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; National Institute of Fine Arts, Beijing; Hong Kong Museum of Art,; Kaohsiung Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan; The Museum of Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan; Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukuoka; National Museum of Art, Osaka amongst others.

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