A donation of nine Zao Wou-Ki paintings has recently been added to the Museé de l’Art Moderne de Paris (MAM Paris). The donation, by the poet’s widow, Françoise Marquet, brings the museum’s holding to eleven paintings, four India ink drawings, four prints and seven vases. The new (and the old works, too) are a treat as well as a useful addition to the museum’s fund of critically important work.
Born in Beijing in 1920, arriving in France in 1948, Zao Wou-Ki was in at the beginning China’s opening to the modern European takes on visual and plastic art. He attended China’s first arts faculty, the China Academy of Art between 1935 and 1941, studying there under Fang Ganmin, an early advocate for a fusion of China and European practices. The academy, founded in 1929, supervised by French-trained painter and educator Lin Fengmian, promoted the idea that, in a modern society, art could take the place of religion – a common enough idea in art circles in Europe at the time and not far from the surface today. The academy has survived all China’s political vicissitudes; it has operated under its original name since the 90s.
Though there’s absolutely no visual resemblance that I know of, Zao Wou-Ki’s work always puts me in mind of the ideograms of the I Ching. These invite the onlooker to contemplate the natural forces represented in the light of a question. Zao’s work, especially his ink drawings, seem to emphasize the role of onlooker perception. Like the I Ching, Zao seems to call to pure perception, not to the self that is perceiving nor to the particular structures of what is perceived.
The emphasis on individual onlooker perception seems to me unique among the moderns with whom Zao associated, as well as those whose influence he claimed, including Matisse, Picasso and Cezanne.
In contrast to Zao, all three artists – and their contemporaries, too – seem to be trying to impose some specific underlying form of the world perceived, whether that’s atomic lattices or color theory or some projected psychology or political message.
At least in the MAM’s newly fortified collection, Zao seems to go out of his way to underline his difference with his contemporaries without spelling out what that difference may be (which makes sense).
For instance, Zao’s Hommage à Henri Matisse II (already in the collection) invites me to wonder where, exactly, the old color maven is to be found in a rising pillar of black between rose and blue, mostly up and down brush strokes. My visual memory finds itself somewhere between Yves Klein and Rothko – no easy connection to Matisse. Is Zao trying to call attention to something implicit in Matisse’s famous color and figure or to his own approach to perception?
Also, a still life called Citrons (part of the recent donation) recalls the intense “real-reality” value of Cézanne’s take on these homely scenes. But Zao entirely dispenses with the older artist’s visual abundance and warmth of color. Citronsmakes me feel I’m reading Heidegger’s essay through the sole of Van Gogh’s Shoes – am I missing how manipulative Cézanne is?
None of the intention I’m lending Zao is out of the ball park. He had a broad of view of how visual art comes to be and plenty of the type of experience in living that tends to blunt the sense that you know what the world is about. For his romantic companions, Zao chose the composer Lalan, the actress and later sculptor Chan May-Kan and the art historian and curator Françoise Marquet (who made the donation).
Zao claimed to be an acolyte to Paul Klee as art theorist as well as a painter. Among his many friends and acquaintance in his adopted country, he counted poets, writers, and even politicians, among many others, poet and painter Henri Michaux, novelist François Cheng (who, among many other endeavors, translated classics of French poetry into Chinese), the sculptor Alberto Giacometti (who also spend a lot of time wondering what was what and why), the Résistance hero and high culture advocate, André Malraux, and l. M. Pei, another important figure in the China-Europe esthetic fusion and architect of, notably, the pyramid of the Louvre.
Have a good long look yourself if you’re in Paris. God knows, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to see Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne. And then, there are also many more works by Zao at Musée Cernuschi, musée des Arts de l’Asie de la Ville de Paris.
Terrific column. Thank you.
Posted by: Warren King | May 02, 2023 at 10:42 PM