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Lot Essay
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Zao Wou-Ki focused on natural scenery and still lifes, but the '50s and early '60s saw him making a transition toward lyrical abstraction. By the late '60s, after exploring abstraction for more than a decade, he had achieved a truly mature style. In it, the elements of his painting - colour, brushwork, and rendering of space - worked together harmoniously in superlative and satisfying works of art (Fig. 1).
While Zao's 18.3.68 (Lot 57), dating from 1968, is somewhat smaller in scale than his other works from the late '60s. It displays meticulous care in developing space on the canvas, and projects a richly layered touch. With Zao Wou-Ki's close attention to depicting space, the rather soft yet succinct textures of this painting nevertheless convey the grand and imposing atmosphere of mountains and seas.
NUCLEAR FUSION ON THE CANVAS
As Zao Wou-Ki's paintings departed ever further from concrete scenic images, what he produced instead were landscapes of the imagination. He once said, "The works of any artist, to the artist himself, are realistic. It's only other viewers who find them abstract." The artist converts a spatial vista from the natural world into a world sealed within the frame of the canvas - but a world that does not fail to embrace sun, moon, and stars. And everything the artist needs begins with a single point.
Zao excelled at producing lines using the oil painting brushes known as "rounds" and "filberts". The tip of the bush, at the moment it touches the canvas, forms a point; points lengthen into lines; and lines spread into planes. The structure of 18.3.68 differs slightly from Zao's works earlier in the '60s, with their centrally-placed "mountain ridge" compositions (Figs. 2 & 3). Its basic structure features areas where forms coalesce and aggregate within an overall diffuse visual field. Through the medium of his fast, sharp, jagged brushstrokes, the shapes and forms of his imagination are condensed on the canvas, and begin jostling against each other. A strong, dark indigo line sweeps in from the center-right, over a thin layer of oils in rainbow-like pastel violets and blues; fine black brushstrokes sweep through a dark wash in the lower right - in a chaotic mass - toward the center-left, meets a more circular form. This circular area forms a visual center of calm that counters the conflict elsewhere. Viewers are invited to move from it and cast a fresh clear eye over the welter of lines in other areas, which cover or obstruct one another, join together, or fade out. Like nuclear particles, small in mass, the collision of these lines releases a huge surge of energy, pushing other elements outward and vaporizing them, after which they coalesce in an even denser mass. Though the center of this circle seems empty, the four sides of the canvas appear to be capable of extending outward to infinity. These effects, like nuclear fusion and coalescence, followed by outward expansion, provide the great energy that seems to radiate from this canvas (Fig. 4).
A FLOATING CYCLE OF 'QI'
Brushwork is fundamental to a painting. It is not static; it suggests concentration and dispersal, rising and falling, and is the indispensable element in the spatial structure of a work. In Zao Wou-Ki's work from the '60s and '70s, spatial presentation takes precedence even over colour (Fig. 5). Another feature of the centrally-placed circle structure mentioned above is the difficulty it presents the viewer in differentiating left and right or any central axis; instead, it presents them with multiple focal points (Fig. 6). The eye, roaming between focal points, senses a dynamic of kinetic motion, and the repeated flow of movement creates a cycle of flowing qi.
In the style of lyrical abstraction that arose in Europe after the war, structured expressions of the artist's emotional stance also played a central role. Artist Sam Francis, known for his spontaneous application of oils, also used thinly applied blues in his abstract work Untitled, which reveals countless different points of focus. But because of the relatively obvious regularity of brushwork in it, it cannot convey nearly the same sense of flowing energy, or the expansive, open quality of 18.3.68 (Fig. 7). The hazy distances that Zao's painting derive from the controlled expressions of feeling in Eastern art, and from the artist's love of nature and Chinese ink-wash painting. He once said, "In Chinese painting, solid forms and empty spaces have a rhythm, constantly in motion as each pushes at the other, giving the pictorial space a wonderful balance between lightness and weight. If you say my painting is different from most Western painters, it probably has to do with my concepts of handling space". In 18.3.68, the qi that floats through the painting is perfectly balanced between motion and stillness. What Zao Wou-Ki produced was clearly not a figurative landscape depiction, but instead a meditation, a realization of the image of the larger universe. Perhaps the real difference between this and Western abstraction is that Zao Wou-Ki is not so much concerned with how we apprehend the environment or its forms, but with providing us a new perspective, a new way of viewing painting itself.
While Zao's 18.3.68 (Lot 57), dating from 1968, is somewhat smaller in scale than his other works from the late '60s. It displays meticulous care in developing space on the canvas, and projects a richly layered touch. With Zao Wou-Ki's close attention to depicting space, the rather soft yet succinct textures of this painting nevertheless convey the grand and imposing atmosphere of mountains and seas.
NUCLEAR FUSION ON THE CANVAS
As Zao Wou-Ki's paintings departed ever further from concrete scenic images, what he produced instead were landscapes of the imagination. He once said, "The works of any artist, to the artist himself, are realistic. It's only other viewers who find them abstract." The artist converts a spatial vista from the natural world into a world sealed within the frame of the canvas - but a world that does not fail to embrace sun, moon, and stars. And everything the artist needs begins with a single point.
Zao excelled at producing lines using the oil painting brushes known as "rounds" and "filberts". The tip of the bush, at the moment it touches the canvas, forms a point; points lengthen into lines; and lines spread into planes. The structure of 18.3.68 differs slightly from Zao's works earlier in the '60s, with their centrally-placed "mountain ridge" compositions (Figs. 2 & 3). Its basic structure features areas where forms coalesce and aggregate within an overall diffuse visual field. Through the medium of his fast, sharp, jagged brushstrokes, the shapes and forms of his imagination are condensed on the canvas, and begin jostling against each other. A strong, dark indigo line sweeps in from the center-right, over a thin layer of oils in rainbow-like pastel violets and blues; fine black brushstrokes sweep through a dark wash in the lower right - in a chaotic mass - toward the center-left, meets a more circular form. This circular area forms a visual center of calm that counters the conflict elsewhere. Viewers are invited to move from it and cast a fresh clear eye over the welter of lines in other areas, which cover or obstruct one another, join together, or fade out. Like nuclear particles, small in mass, the collision of these lines releases a huge surge of energy, pushing other elements outward and vaporizing them, after which they coalesce in an even denser mass. Though the center of this circle seems empty, the four sides of the canvas appear to be capable of extending outward to infinity. These effects, like nuclear fusion and coalescence, followed by outward expansion, provide the great energy that seems to radiate from this canvas (Fig. 4).
A FLOATING CYCLE OF 'QI'
Brushwork is fundamental to a painting. It is not static; it suggests concentration and dispersal, rising and falling, and is the indispensable element in the spatial structure of a work. In Zao Wou-Ki's work from the '60s and '70s, spatial presentation takes precedence even over colour (Fig. 5). Another feature of the centrally-placed circle structure mentioned above is the difficulty it presents the viewer in differentiating left and right or any central axis; instead, it presents them with multiple focal points (Fig. 6). The eye, roaming between focal points, senses a dynamic of kinetic motion, and the repeated flow of movement creates a cycle of flowing qi.
In the style of lyrical abstraction that arose in Europe after the war, structured expressions of the artist's emotional stance also played a central role. Artist Sam Francis, known for his spontaneous application of oils, also used thinly applied blues in his abstract work Untitled, which reveals countless different points of focus. But because of the relatively obvious regularity of brushwork in it, it cannot convey nearly the same sense of flowing energy, or the expansive, open quality of 18.3.68 (Fig. 7). The hazy distances that Zao's painting derive from the controlled expressions of feeling in Eastern art, and from the artist's love of nature and Chinese ink-wash painting. He once said, "In Chinese painting, solid forms and empty spaces have a rhythm, constantly in motion as each pushes at the other, giving the pictorial space a wonderful balance between lightness and weight. If you say my painting is different from most Western painters, it probably has to do with my concepts of handling space". In 18.3.68, the qi that floats through the painting is perfectly balanced between motion and stillness. What Zao Wou-Ki produced was clearly not a figurative landscape depiction, but instead a meditation, a realization of the image of the larger universe. Perhaps the real difference between this and Western abstraction is that Zao Wou-Ki is not so much concerned with how we apprehend the environment or its forms, but with providing us a new perspective, a new way of viewing painting itself.