Zao Wou-Ki
2013-04-17 15:12:52 未知
Zao Wou-Ki, who has died aged 92, was a leading Chinese artist adopted by the art world in post-war Europe. His canvases, which have fetched more than £5 million each, have also become the prize possessions in collections of the new super-elite in Taiwan and China, where he is considered their only master of the period.
Zao’s vibrant, highly-worked style combined ornate traditional Chinese landscape painting with the freer language of European abstraction studied from Paul Klee and Picasso. His works are in major international public art collections, including the Tate, MoMA and the Guggenheim; he was also hailed by former French President Jacques Chirac, an enthusiastic Orientalist .
But it is in China, which he left aged 28, narrowly escaping an artistic career in the service of the communist regime, that he is most revered . His death was widely reported in state newspapers and he was described as being “like a god in China – the master of post-war” by the Hong Kong art dealer Pascal de Sarthe.
Over a career which spanned nearly seven decades, Zao became the highest-selling Chinese painter of his generation. Demand for his work went off the scale in the last decade with the ballooning of the Chinese contemporary art market. In the week of his death one of his diptychs, 10.03.83, fetched $4.75 million at a Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong, where his record for a single work is $9 million.
The son of an affluent banker descended from the royal Song dynasty, Zao Wou-Ki was born in Beijing on February 13 1921. He studied Chinese calligraphy through his childhood and became interested in the work of the European avant garde while training, and later teaching, in Hangzhou.
Lucky enough to have substantial financial backing to set him up in Europe’s most culturally fertile quarter, Montparnasse in Paris, he left China on the eve of revolution, in 1948.
Immediately rejecting his heritage, he started off by emulating Paul Klee; his distinctive collisions of Oriental and Occidental pictorial forms, which sought harmony through lavish and often ethereal painterly experiments, did not emerge until the mid- to late Fifties.
Working on set designs for a Roland Petit ballet in 1954 prompted him to experiment with a new style: “My painting became unreadable, still-lifes and flowers no longer existed.” This preceded a desire to return to his roots. In a 1961 interview he said: “I have gradually rediscovered China; it has affirmed itself as my deeper personality. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is to Paris I owe this return to my deepest origins.”
To President Chirac, he served as an unofficial cultural ambassador, accompanying him on a trip to China in 1997. Chirac wrote the preface to the exhibition catalogue for the artist’s first major Chinese retrospective in Shanghai in 1998, and appointed him to the Legion of Honour in 2006.
In 1958 the Tate Gallery in London acquired Zao’s painting Before the Storm; but in a letter to the gallery in 1974 he suggested that the title was misleading: “Since 1967 I have only given my pictures the date as reference... if my painting looks like a landscape, this is completely accidental; as for the Chinese influence, it is, I think, in spite of myself.”
The vast majority of Zao’s sold paintings now rest in private Asian collections after demand for his work took off in Taiwan, where traditional Chinese values were upheld throughout Mao’s reign. “His abstraction is perceived very differently in the East. The Chinese will look at the painting and see a mountain, the wind, water – much more than the single brushstroke they might see in the West,” said de Sarthe, not missing the irony that a painter who spent a lifetime pursuing an aesthetic unity between two very different cultures now divides the international modern art market.
Zao was described as a “small, kind, very knowledgeable man with exceptionally intelligent eyes” and “a devil on the tennis court” by his American gallerist Pierre Levai, of Marlborough Fine Art.
Zao Wou-Ki is survived by his third wife, Francois Marquet, and by a son from his first marriage .
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