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Lot Essay
French-Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki was active for over sixty years in the international art scene. His abstract works successfully turnedblank canvases into richly meaningful spaces – spaces in which we can remember, or imagine, or linger for a time. These ultimately became a kind of individual space capable of connecting with the lives of viewers.
16.02.64 (Lot 365) dates from 1964, a time when Zao Wou-ki had already lived in France for 20 years and was well-versed in the concepts and techniques of Western art. But long exploration of his own cultural roots also led, in 16.02.64, to a harmonious and successful melding of Eastern and Western elements.In Zao's work from the '60s, spatial presentation takes precedence even over color. Zao inherited the legacy of the Chinese painting masters who came before, borrowing the 'scattered' or multiple- point perspective from traditional Chinese painting. In order to depict grand vistas in their paintings, Chinese landscape painters divided the vertical axes of their works into four sections, allowing the tableau to accommodate several focal points (Fig. 1 ). To present three-dimensional objects, the Western fixed-position perspective uses one point of focus in the tableau to concentrate the scope of landscape. A landscape painting by Lin Fengmian, who was Zao's teacher in Hangzhou, abandons the hanging scroll format in favor of a square format, which is divided into horizontal bands that form the four sections of composition, which include the sky, the faraway mountains, the gentle slopes, and the rivers.
16.02.64 brings together the close-up, the foreground,the middle and the faraway into the same pictorial plane. Alternating ruddy brown and beige white horizontal masses divide the canvas into four parts. The interplay of solid lines and empty space, as in calligraphy, creates great power, and the combination of motion and stillness in the painting produces its sense of convergence, pauses, and flow. Zao 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.'
16.02.64 (Lot 365) dates from 1964, a time when Zao Wou-ki had already lived in France for 20 years and was well-versed in the concepts and techniques of Western art. But long exploration of his own cultural roots also led, in 16.02.64, to a harmonious and successful melding of Eastern and Western elements.In Zao's work from the '60s, spatial presentation takes precedence even over color. Zao inherited the legacy of the Chinese painting masters who came before, borrowing the 'scattered' or multiple- point perspective from traditional Chinese painting. In order to depict grand vistas in their paintings, Chinese landscape painters divided the vertical axes of their works into four sections, allowing the tableau to accommodate several focal points (Fig. 1 ). To present three-dimensional objects, the Western fixed-position perspective uses one point of focus in the tableau to concentrate the scope of landscape. A landscape painting by Lin Fengmian, who was Zao's teacher in Hangzhou, abandons the hanging scroll format in favor of a square format, which is divided into horizontal bands that form the four sections of composition, which include the sky, the faraway mountains, the gentle slopes, and the rivers.
16.02.64 brings together the close-up, the foreground,the middle and the faraway into the same pictorial plane. Alternating ruddy brown and beige white horizontal masses divide the canvas into four parts. The interplay of solid lines and empty space, as in calligraphy, creates great power, and the combination of motion and stillness in the painting produces its sense of convergence, pauses, and flow. Zao 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.'