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拍品专文
‘I aim at an imaginary and illegible writing’
ZAO WOU-KI
‘Painting, painting, always painting, painting again, the best possible, the empty and the full, the light and the dense, the living and the breath’
ZAO WOU-KI
‘Everybody is bound by a tradition – I, by two’
ZAO WOU-KI
‘I used to admire Monet, Renoir, Modigliani, and Matisse, however, it was Cézanne who helped me to become a Chinese artist again’
ZAO WOU-KI
Poised on the brink of legibility, 12.05.60 is a jewel-like example of Zao Wou-Ki’s poetic painterly language. Against a deliquescent sea of blue and green tones, a cluster of calligraphic marks scores the surface of the canvas, quivering like ancient pictograms. Executed in 1960, the work demonstrates the artist’s move towards pure abstraction in the decade following his relocation from China to Paris. In 1948, Zao had left his native Shanghai to explore the world of the French masters he had revered from afar. Having spent his youth poring over reproductions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European paintings, the artist immersed himself in the city’s museums and galleries, drawing particular inspiration from the light-suffused canvases of the French Impressionists. By 1960, his unique dialogue between Eastern and Western visual traditions had pushed him onto a global stage, bringing him into contact with a host of international artistic languages. The present work was created shortly after his return from a highly successful world tour, spanning Europe, America and Asia. In particular, 12.05.60 bears witness to his encounters with the gestural languages of Abstract Expressionism in New York, where he had admired the expressive freedom cultivated by artists such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Where his earlier linear markings had bordered on readable Chinese characters, they now dissolved into blurred schismatic traces. A new sense of weightlessness began to pervade his use of oil, evoking not only the fluid surfaces of Colour Field painting but also the ink washes commonly deployed by Chinese landscape artists. As Zao would later confess, it was ultimately through his engagement with diverse Western practices that he would come to re-evaluate the significance of his own heritage. ‘Everybody is bound by a tradition’, he claimed – ‘I, by two’ (Zao Wou- Ki, 1964, quoted in P. Schneider, ‘Zao Wou- Ki’, in Louvre Dialogues, New York 1971, p. 131). In 2018, the artist’s practice will be celebrated in a major retrospective at the Musée national d’art modern in Paris.
Zao’s move to the French capital – initially intended as a short stay – was something of a spiritual pilgrimage. Having previously devoured Western art through grainy images in magazines, he relished the opportunity to wander the halls of the Musée du Louvre, studying every detail of works that were deeply ingrained in his psyche. He nurtured relationships with many of the city’s leading avant-garde figures, taking a studio apartment in Montparnasse next to Alberto Giacometti, as well as corresponding with Jean Dubuffet and collaborating with Henri Michaux. Through his association with the School of Paris, Zao championed abstraction as a viable means of expression in the post- War era, despite feelings amongst many of his contemporaries that the brutal realities of conflict had rendered it unthinkable. ‘My painting becomes illegible’, he claimed in 1954. ‘No more still lives or flowers. I aim at an imaginary and illegible writing’ (Zao Wou- Ki, quoted at https://www.zaowouki.org/ biographie/en/ [accessed 15 May 2017]). Zao’s embrace of non-figurative reality, however, was perhaps more strongly rooted in his personal circumstances: namely, the challenge of existing between Chinese and Western cultures. Abstraction, with its rejection of concrete meaning, allowed him to transcend both traditions and – ultimately – to hint at universal states of being. ‘French thought and Chinese thought are not the same’, he explained. ‘It’s hard to translate between them. Sometimes you must wear yourself out trying to understand. Painting must express these feelings’ (Zao Wou-Ki, quoted in J. Grimes, ‘Zao Wou-ki: Painting beyond words (1920-2013)’, https://edition. cnn.com/2013/04/11/opinion/painter-zaowou- ki/, 12 April 2013 [accessed 15 May 2017]).
ZAO WOU-KI
‘Painting, painting, always painting, painting again, the best possible, the empty and the full, the light and the dense, the living and the breath’
ZAO WOU-KI
‘Everybody is bound by a tradition – I, by two’
ZAO WOU-KI
‘I used to admire Monet, Renoir, Modigliani, and Matisse, however, it was Cézanne who helped me to become a Chinese artist again’
ZAO WOU-KI
Poised on the brink of legibility, 12.05.60 is a jewel-like example of Zao Wou-Ki’s poetic painterly language. Against a deliquescent sea of blue and green tones, a cluster of calligraphic marks scores the surface of the canvas, quivering like ancient pictograms. Executed in 1960, the work demonstrates the artist’s move towards pure abstraction in the decade following his relocation from China to Paris. In 1948, Zao had left his native Shanghai to explore the world of the French masters he had revered from afar. Having spent his youth poring over reproductions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European paintings, the artist immersed himself in the city’s museums and galleries, drawing particular inspiration from the light-suffused canvases of the French Impressionists. By 1960, his unique dialogue between Eastern and Western visual traditions had pushed him onto a global stage, bringing him into contact with a host of international artistic languages. The present work was created shortly after his return from a highly successful world tour, spanning Europe, America and Asia. In particular, 12.05.60 bears witness to his encounters with the gestural languages of Abstract Expressionism in New York, where he had admired the expressive freedom cultivated by artists such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Where his earlier linear markings had bordered on readable Chinese characters, they now dissolved into blurred schismatic traces. A new sense of weightlessness began to pervade his use of oil, evoking not only the fluid surfaces of Colour Field painting but also the ink washes commonly deployed by Chinese landscape artists. As Zao would later confess, it was ultimately through his engagement with diverse Western practices that he would come to re-evaluate the significance of his own heritage. ‘Everybody is bound by a tradition’, he claimed – ‘I, by two’ (Zao Wou- Ki, 1964, quoted in P. Schneider, ‘Zao Wou- Ki’, in Louvre Dialogues, New York 1971, p. 131). In 2018, the artist’s practice will be celebrated in a major retrospective at the Musée national d’art modern in Paris.
Zao’s move to the French capital – initially intended as a short stay – was something of a spiritual pilgrimage. Having previously devoured Western art through grainy images in magazines, he relished the opportunity to wander the halls of the Musée du Louvre, studying every detail of works that were deeply ingrained in his psyche. He nurtured relationships with many of the city’s leading avant-garde figures, taking a studio apartment in Montparnasse next to Alberto Giacometti, as well as corresponding with Jean Dubuffet and collaborating with Henri Michaux. Through his association with the School of Paris, Zao championed abstraction as a viable means of expression in the post- War era, despite feelings amongst many of his contemporaries that the brutal realities of conflict had rendered it unthinkable. ‘My painting becomes illegible’, he claimed in 1954. ‘No more still lives or flowers. I aim at an imaginary and illegible writing’ (Zao Wou- Ki, quoted at https://www.zaowouki.org/ biographie/en/ [accessed 15 May 2017]). Zao’s embrace of non-figurative reality, however, was perhaps more strongly rooted in his personal circumstances: namely, the challenge of existing between Chinese and Western cultures. Abstraction, with its rejection of concrete meaning, allowed him to transcend both traditions and – ultimately – to hint at universal states of being. ‘French thought and Chinese thought are not the same’, he explained. ‘It’s hard to translate between them. Sometimes you must wear yourself out trying to understand. Painting must express these feelings’ (Zao Wou-Ki, quoted in J. Grimes, ‘Zao Wou-ki: Painting beyond words (1920-2013)’, https://edition. cnn.com/2013/04/11/opinion/painter-zaowou- ki/, 12 April 2013 [accessed 15 May 2017]).