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拍品专文
I paint my own life buy I also try to paint an invisible place, that of dreams, somewhere where one feels in perfect harmony, even in the midst of agitated shapes or opposing forces. Every picture, from the smallest to the biggest, is always a fragment of that dream place.
Zao Wou-Ki
By the mid-1950s, narrative contents had disappeared from Zao Wou-ki's paintings as the artist turned to abstraction to convey a deeper feeling. According to Zao, this was a natural evolution: "It wasn't a deliberate move on my part; extracting my paintings from reality was a kind of necessity, and it just came about naturally." The romanticized and representational depiction of landscape and figures is what the artist wanted to extract from his works. He replaced such depiction with imaginative oracle-bone inscriptions, the linear motifs of his own creation. Through these incomprehensible symbols and signs, Zao projected feelings towards the course of life that would be otherwise difficult to express. By the end of the 1950s, however, Zao was already moving away from his Oracle-Bone series and shifting toward pure abstraction to express a grander inner vision. As pointed out by Zao's friend François Cheng, "this was a new phase, concluding the series of works concerned with the physical world." This new phase thus capped off Zao's previous periods in which he focused on figurative subjects and symbolic motifs. Over time he transitioned from a painterly approach to a more suggestive vocabulary.
Zao Wou-Ki work, C?me (Lot 5), dates from 1955 to 1956, representing the artist's transition from Klee-inspired works to his "oracle-bone inscription" series. Zao's brushwork creates interlacing lines, some fine and some heavy, in inky black tones, in which we seem to get a glimpse of the symbolic, pictorial elements twisting and leaping across the canvas. These linear motifs fade away only to resurface again elsewhere, finally resolving into forms much like those that appeared in the inscriptions found on ancient Chinese bronzes. In the center of the work, they weave together and build up to produce forms with shapes of the imposing presence of mountain peaks. Zao's symbolic motifs therefore become actual forms, and the background becomes the space in which they reside. The artist's changing brush techniques produce the animated lightness and freedom of the work. Set off by the underlay of color, the abstract mountain forms climb upward along the central axis of the work, stretching upward like lofty peaks reaching up above dense, enshrouding mists. Zao makes use of changing structures of lines to recreate a sense of life and harmonious movements within nature. And reminiscent of Cezanne's belief that the artist must seek within, Zao Wou-Ki expresses his feelings about his own approach to abstraction in this way: "The subject matter of painting is simply letting the freedom of your spirit flow forth, and creating new combinations without regard for any constraining rules. There is no other consideration beyond your own inner search for these things."
Though Zao Wou-Ki understood and infused styles with the influences of Abstract Expressionism painters in the West, the source of his concepts about abstraction in painting nevertheless had their roots in the scholar painters of the literati class in ancient Chinese tradition. Zong Bing of the Six Dynasties, in his "Preface to Landscape Painting," said, "If a painting can arouse in the viewer's heart the same mood as when he faces the actual scene, then the painting has captured, has replaced, the power of the original scene, and the viewer comes into contact with the soul of what so appeals to us in nature." The C?me on offer here employs a mild white softened tones with the touches of green-blue and pale reds; the glowing haloes of color heighten further the beauty of the linear motifs, creating the sense of fleeting, shifting moments of time. Outlining of the mountain peaks are done not with solid lines but with textural strokes, rich brushwork, and spatial effects to convey the sense that viewers themselves are climbing high and roving through this landscape. In such a compositional layout, the vague and indirect dynamic structure lends tremendous imaginative space to the pictorial space, suggesting that everything here is "in the midst of change," in an entirely new kind of visual interpretation of the inner life of nature. Zao Wou-Ki's exploration of the ultimate images of creative forces at work in a landscape create an ideal world, a projection of his mind and spirit that carried him beyond the mundane frustrations and worries of the real world. In the process it brought his style of abstract painting to the summit of Chinese art.
Zao Wou-Ki
By the mid-1950s, narrative contents had disappeared from Zao Wou-ki's paintings as the artist turned to abstraction to convey a deeper feeling. According to Zao, this was a natural evolution: "It wasn't a deliberate move on my part; extracting my paintings from reality was a kind of necessity, and it just came about naturally." The romanticized and representational depiction of landscape and figures is what the artist wanted to extract from his works. He replaced such depiction with imaginative oracle-bone inscriptions, the linear motifs of his own creation. Through these incomprehensible symbols and signs, Zao projected feelings towards the course of life that would be otherwise difficult to express. By the end of the 1950s, however, Zao was already moving away from his Oracle-Bone series and shifting toward pure abstraction to express a grander inner vision. As pointed out by Zao's friend François Cheng, "this was a new phase, concluding the series of works concerned with the physical world." This new phase thus capped off Zao's previous periods in which he focused on figurative subjects and symbolic motifs. Over time he transitioned from a painterly approach to a more suggestive vocabulary.
Zao Wou-Ki work, C?me (Lot 5), dates from 1955 to 1956, representing the artist's transition from Klee-inspired works to his "oracle-bone inscription" series. Zao's brushwork creates interlacing lines, some fine and some heavy, in inky black tones, in which we seem to get a glimpse of the symbolic, pictorial elements twisting and leaping across the canvas. These linear motifs fade away only to resurface again elsewhere, finally resolving into forms much like those that appeared in the inscriptions found on ancient Chinese bronzes. In the center of the work, they weave together and build up to produce forms with shapes of the imposing presence of mountain peaks. Zao's symbolic motifs therefore become actual forms, and the background becomes the space in which they reside. The artist's changing brush techniques produce the animated lightness and freedom of the work. Set off by the underlay of color, the abstract mountain forms climb upward along the central axis of the work, stretching upward like lofty peaks reaching up above dense, enshrouding mists. Zao makes use of changing structures of lines to recreate a sense of life and harmonious movements within nature. And reminiscent of Cezanne's belief that the artist must seek within, Zao Wou-Ki expresses his feelings about his own approach to abstraction in this way: "The subject matter of painting is simply letting the freedom of your spirit flow forth, and creating new combinations without regard for any constraining rules. There is no other consideration beyond your own inner search for these things."
Though Zao Wou-Ki understood and infused styles with the influences of Abstract Expressionism painters in the West, the source of his concepts about abstraction in painting nevertheless had their roots in the scholar painters of the literati class in ancient Chinese tradition. Zong Bing of the Six Dynasties, in his "Preface to Landscape Painting," said, "If a painting can arouse in the viewer's heart the same mood as when he faces the actual scene, then the painting has captured, has replaced, the power of the original scene, and the viewer comes into contact with the soul of what so appeals to us in nature." The C?me on offer here employs a mild white softened tones with the touches of green-blue and pale reds; the glowing haloes of color heighten further the beauty of the linear motifs, creating the sense of fleeting, shifting moments of time. Outlining of the mountain peaks are done not with solid lines but with textural strokes, rich brushwork, and spatial effects to convey the sense that viewers themselves are climbing high and roving through this landscape. In such a compositional layout, the vague and indirect dynamic structure lends tremendous imaginative space to the pictorial space, suggesting that everything here is "in the midst of change," in an entirely new kind of visual interpretation of the inner life of nature. Zao Wou-Ki's exploration of the ultimate images of creative forces at work in a landscape create an ideal world, a projection of his mind and spirit that carried him beyond the mundane frustrations and worries of the real world. In the process it brought his style of abstract painting to the summit of Chinese art.