Zao Wou-Ki, Lately
by Jonathan Hay
Zao Wou-Ki, now
82, found his distinctive voice and vocabulary in his mid-thirties,
having by that time lived in Paris for a decade. By the end of 1957
he had committed to abstraction, on terms which from the beginning set
him apart from the other artists of his circle—Mitchell, Riopelle,
Vieira da Silva, Soulages—as much as from his great supporter Henri
Michaux. 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. The recognition, however, took the form of
a view of Zao’s painting as an exemplary reconciliation of Chinese
and European aesthetics, in which the language of modern Western abstraction
is enriched by a Chinese sensibility rooted in the past. At the risk
of disturbing a consensus that over the years has too often, perhaps,
replaced criticism with mythology, it is worth pointing out that this
congenial view has the disadvantage of eliding all sense of the anxiety
and contradictions confronted by the artist as he created his own ever-provisional
sense of belonging. The implicit and sometimes explicit characterization
of Zao’s work as a gateway for Westerners to age-old Chinese wisdom—a
characterization that exoticizes the work even as it honors it —created
in its time a receptive environment for the paintings. Today, however—and
especially on this side of the Atlantic—it is probably more likely
to prevent full appreciation of his extremely difficult achievement,
and of the way his paintings can speak to us differently, more humanly,
of coming to terms with the in-betweenness of a dual cultural heritage.
For New Yorkers
a reassessment of Zao Wou-Ki’s work is long overdue. Since the
last of the sixteen solo shows that he held in the United States from
1952 until the retirement of his long-time New York dealer Sam Kootz
in 1968, Zao has had only limited exposure in the United States. His
ink monochromes were seen at Jan Krugier Gallery in 1998; the last exhibition
of his oil paintings was at Pierre Matisse in 1986, following an earlier
show in 1980. In contrast, during the last thirty-five years his profile
elsewhere in the world, especially Europe and Asia, could hardly have
been higher, with a constant flow of solo shows, not to mention retrospectives
of which the first was held at the Grand Palais in 1981. Several factors
combined to marginalize his work in the United States: the conceptual
turn that painting took here in the 1960s, a concomitant suspicion of
transcendentalist ambition in painting that could only be confirmed
by the discourse around Zao’s work, a more general sidelining of
Paris-based artists, and the more limited prevalence in New York of
the intense fascination for China from which Zao benefited in France.
Today, however, the circumstances are more propitious. New York is in
the midst of rediscovering the painting of post-war Paris, and enough
time has passed for it to be possible to look afresh at the sublime
visions of high modernist abstraction. Above all there is now for the
first time a generalized awareness of intercultural experience as an
independently complex, formative factor in the styles of countless modern
and contemporary artists. Let us hope that these factors conspire happily
in Zao Wou-Ki’s favor because, far from being a living monument,
he is a vital painter whose work of the last twenty years represents,
in this writer’s view, the height of his achievement.
The evolution of
his painting came, as Zao has said, by stages. The commitment to abstraction
followed his only extended stay in the United States, where he encountered
Abstract Expressionism first-hand at the height of its prestige. Freed
by its example to commit himself more physically to the painting, he
developed an art in which the seeming gestural performance was in fact
painstakingly constructed, its role ultimately subordinate to the atmospherics
of each work. Until about 1972 Zao explored the multiple possibilities
of this approach, in paintings that were latterly sometimes on a very
large scale (as large as two meters by five). The remainder of the 1970s,
however, were a period of reorientation, from which survives a body
of work divided between two approaches. On the one hand, he pushed his
earlier mode to extremes of dramatic effect, almost as if seeking to
persuade himself that it could hold his interest for ever. But concurrently
he took up ink painting again—he had learnt to handle the Chinese
brush in his youth—with enormous success and with a decisive if
intermittent impact on his practice of oil painting. In the paintings
of the mid- to late seventies that register this impact most fully,
he laid aside the sharp gesturalist rhetoric that had been his trademark,
replacing it with a softened, blunted markmaking that fused image and
space in a new, arguably more subtle way that recalls the alchemy of
ink and xuan paper. In the course of 1979 Zao abandoned his older approach
altogether and devoted himself entirely to the new stylistic direction
that he had traced out for himself in a few key paintings of the 1970s.
Out of this shift came a decade of work that attains a state of grace:
a quality of gesture that is stripped of all hurriedness and creates
a more powerful “bone-structure” (to use a term from Chinese
calligraphy and painting), a luminosity extending from infinite softness
to enveloping darkness, a topography of form that opens itself to stillness
and silence. Crucially, the artist expunged his earlier volontarist
effort to control the pictorial space through directive brushstrokes,
allowing now a more active structuring role to fields of color and pattern
as a counterweight to the brushstrokes and the image fragments created
by them. Around 1990, he further calibrated this late approach, extending
the perameters of his worldmaking to include ravishing compositions
dominated by saturated hues where he largely eschews the infinite possibilities
of his beloved black. As if to commemorate this new-found coloristic
freedom and acknowledge one of its sources, in 1991 he painted the triptych
Hommage à Monet, a clear predecessor to the equally monumental
triptych included here, Hommage à mon ami Henri Michaux, painted
nine years later.
The oil paintings
in the present exhibition date from 1993 to 2002. Some, like 01.02.1997
and 11.8.99 (an undeclared hommage to Monet), join the triptych in coloristic
hedonism. These paintings have rich, sensuous surfaces that repay the
closest attention, dense as they are with pourings, spatterings, wipes,
accretions, and marks of all sorts. Contrastingly, several other works
favor understatement, with muted harmonies that are sometimes pointed
up by a touch of more intense color (28.10.2001; 15.11.01; 24.02.2002).
Here the surfaces tend to be less worked and there is a particular lightness
of touch. Between these two poles are situated all manner of hybrids
in which Zao searches for an equilibrium between a saturated hue—a
vermilion, an acid yellow—and more muted harmonies of color built
around black/grey/brown/white brush traces that hint at an image (10.01.2001
– 08.03.2002; 01.07.2001). The exhibition also includes certain
works in which he looks back to his own earlier styles. His approach
of the late nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties is reinterpreted in
the roiling rhythms of 27.02.98 via a less impetuous brush-trace. And
21.08.95 alludes to work from the mid-nineteen-fifties when he was still
engaged with a project of ideographic sign-making. The character-like
forms dropping from the sky revive the columns of pseudo-characters
in Hommage à Qu Yuan (5.05.55), in both cases evoking without
imitating them the archaic inscriptions cast into the ritual bronze
vessels of China’s ancient past.
Zao himself speaks
often of his horror of “chinoiseries,” and has repeatedly
stated that it was this above all that kept him from the medium of ink
painting until the early 1970s. Yet at the same time he has frankly
acknowledged that at each stage of his career he has drawn heavily upon
his knowledge of Chinese ink painting in order to advance his own practice
of oil painting. Both the ambivalence and the engagement are visible
in every work. The fundamental elements of intercultural dialogue that
inform his paintings today can be traced back to the late 1950s. A use
of color that comes out of the Western oil painting tradition is—most
often—complicated by the recourse to a black that recalls ink.
Brute markmaking is reconciled with an aesthetic of the trace that derives
from the sharp-tipped Chinese brush. As in the work of his abstractionist
contemporaries in Paris, the image field (to borrow Meyer Schapiro’s
term) pulls the eye laterally, vertically, obliquely; however, Zao’s
image fields also depend on the creation of a textural depth—a
depth in surface that tends to confound both matrix and gravity—for
which ink painting is the model. Within the surface environments that
are thereby created, the image is able to take on an inscriptional,
non-architectonic character. Moreover, whereas a familiar Western compositional
dynamics sets the macrocosm of the image against the microcosm of pictorial
incidents and seeks a unity within the boundaries of the frame, in Zao’s
work this is forced into dialogue with a specifically Chinese approach
to the edges of the painting, where the edges are negated by the energy
flow of the composition: what we see is a fragment of a larger continuum.
And the light of Zao’s painting, though it makes full use of hue
and tone on a Western model that internalizes the qualities of external
light sources, also aims at something else entirely—an internal
luminosity that treats light as one of the defining properties of things:
an expression of their interior energy. Still, if the elements of dialogue
are constant, the terms have evolved over time. In Zao’s late work,
the Chinese side carries more weight than before.
Central to the
resolutions achieved by Zao’s oil paintings has always been a fluidity
and transparency that he seems to have mastered first in lithography,
where he made unusually extensive use of water from the beginning. Is
it possible that lithography played the same role in relation to his
oil paintings of the late fifties and sixties that ink painting plays
for his late work? It is not irrelevant that the two mediums are linked
by their paper support, the prestige of which contrasts so strikingly
in Chinese and Western art. One may even wonder whether lithography
did not in fact function as an acceptably Western stand-in for ink painting
at a time when Zao still found it necessary to reject the Chinese medium.
His later embrace of ink painting as a separate (if, in the artist’s
eyes, secondary) practice was made possible by years of success as an
oil painter: it reflects a confidence that is as much cultural as strictly
pictorial.1 The subsequent role of ink
painting as a touchstone, as this writer sees it, has enabled Zao to
establish successful dialogues between the formal heritage of oil painting
and an organic logic of form as interacting solid and void—form
in process—that finds its model in the textural depth and surface
alchemies of classical Chinese ink painting. (A particularly obvious
example in the exhibition is 11.11.1996 where the electric storm of
black spatters above the buttermilk yellow void seems drawn directly
from the artist’s ink painting repertory). Just how successful
these dialogues are is not always evident in gallery lighting, which
betrays the natural north light in which they were painted and leeches
the subtleties from the colors. Nor will it be evident to the viewer
who is unfamiliar with classical Chinese painting just how difficult
it is to achieve a comparable degree of lightness and movement in the
alien medium of oil paint. Stranded between two histories of painting,
Zao Wou-Ki inhabits his self-defined dialogue in an impressive aloneness;
yet this very isolation is the condition of resonances that lie as much
in the direction of Joan Mitchell and Pierre Soulages as of the Chinese
masters, both classical and modern.2
Abstraction is
somewhat misleading as a description of Zao’s paintings; it would
be more accurate to say that their image field hovers between nature
and abstraction, once in a while slipping over the edge into the reminiscence
of a Chinese landscape schema (12.12.2000, for example, or 19.10.2001).
Faithful to a fundamental Chinese aesthetic assumption, he paints an
experience of the world in which he himself is implicated; the world
he summons up is never entirely separate from him. For this reason his
paintings can always be read in two directions, either as evocations
of the macrocosmic environments of experience or as articulations of
a deeply private emotional topography. The latter dimension is an aspect
of abstraction about which contemporary artists in the West tend to
be coy, perhaps fearing the accusation of an arrière-garde romanticism.
For Chinese artists, on the other hand, as partial heirs to an explicit
literati practice of self-fashioning, the emotional self-reference is
fundamental to meaning. Although the artist’s practice of entitling
the paintings by their date of completion obscures the connection between
this image-field topography and his own emotional force field, he has
unequivocally acknowledged its existence for a few paintings that register
moments of great personal upheaval.3 But
the connection has general significance for his work. If Zao Wou-Ki
has always had the privilege of financial comfort, and has led a career
so successful as to seem charmed, his private life has been marked continuously
by long-term and short-term emotional dramas with which the artist still
contends today. These he has described in his autobiography with a moving
simplicity and frankness, just as he has written eloquently of his windowless
studio’s role as a sanctuary from psychological fears that go back
to his childhood. It is clear that the palpable anxiety, even turbulence
of certain works, and the beautiful dreams of others, almost always
shadowed by darkness and loss, have their roots in the accumulation
of specific experiences (though the paintings never, in Zao’s words,
“tell stories”).4 Most of his
dramas have been directly related to his self-displacement from China
to Paris, which had unintended and uncontrollable consequences for the
artist and those closest to him. Equally, the complex sense of solitude
that is evoked by so many paintings is indissociable from a life lived
between countries and cultures.
Two fundamental
realities of the self-displaced artist are often underestimated. First,
(s)he is always stranded and the reconciliation with this experience
is always provisional. Second, for such artists the “I” of
painting is a psychic necessity; thus what may seem like a delayed romanticism
(even, in Zao’s case, to the artist himself) is not quite what
it appears.5 Zao Wou-Ki has created an
immense world of his own, unique belonging into which we are freely
invited—though what we see depends on how willing we are not to
be tourists.
