Zao Wou-Ki

Painted a few years after Zao Wou-Ki moved to Paris in 1948 and shortly before he made the move to total abstraction between 1953 and 1957, Oiseaux volent partout is an enchanting seascape that hints at the expressive colourist tendencies of his later work. Classically trained at the National School of Fine Arts in Hungchow, just as he signs his name using Chinese characters for his first name and Western orthography for his last, Zao’s distinctive style blends traditional Chinese drawing and painting techniques with influences from modern Western masters (most notably Paul Klee). It is a style that seems effortlessly light; he paints, as Léger said, “in a mist”. The poet Henri Michaux, writing in a 1952 preface to a catalogue of Zao’s works, noted that “The fine zigzag strokes of his drawing, with its multiple blending of bushes, boats and men seems to have been traced behind the uneven waft of a curtain. Unfaithfully accurate, they render the landscape without following it, and with minute, twig-like intricacies give life to the distant figures.” (cited in: Jean Leymarie, Zao Wou-Ki, Barcelona 1979, p. 20)

In Oiseaux volent partout (Birds fligh everywhere), Zao has painted a seascape of airy density. Seascapes are rare in traditional Chinese art and Zao may well have been inspired by the visits he paid shortly before painting this work to Amsterdam and Antwerp, whose busy sea-ports amazed him. Here, Zao has translated the bustle of a major European port into an image that for all the activity it depicts is nonetheless deeply calm. His painterly technique is exquisite yet direct, achieving shifts in tone by sandpapering or scraping the paint to create wonderful nuances in the aquamarines, ambers and ash-greys he so skilfully employs. Zao paints with the assurance of line characteristic of traditional Chinese artists and he coats the surface with oils as thinly as if he were using watercolours. Oiseaux volent partout is a willowy image, gracefully amalgamating the figurative with the abstract, the occidental and the oriental, the traditional and the modern, into one jewel-like painting.