Zao, who was recently deemed the highest selling living Chinese artist, suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, the Associated Foreign Press reports. He passed away at 93 years old.

Zao was born in Beijing and moved to Paris when he was 28, incorporating a Western modernist aesthetic with Chinese sentiments and techniques. Jonathan Hay described Zao's bifurcated identity in an essay for Malborough Gallery:

His cypher-like signature, to which he has remained faithful for over fifty years, gives his first name in Chinese characters and his last in a Western orthography. It is emblematic of a stranded cultural identity, recognized from the first by sympathetic critics as the key to his artistic direction.

Zao's artistic influenced was finally realized in the later phase of his life; last week a diptych entitled "10.03.83" sold for $4.8 million at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong.