The Avenue of Wu Ji - Zao Wou-Ki Centennial Retrospective Special Exhibition" was grandly opened at the Art Museum of China Academy of Art. The exhibition showcases 129 oil paintings by Zao Wou-Ki, as well as more than 200 important works and related documents, which is the largest retrospective exhibition of Zao Wou-Ki in Asia held in China, the highest standard of Zao Wou-Ki's art exhibition, and also the tribute to the roots of Chinese civilization by the most influential Chinese artist in the world, showing the outstanding achievements of Sino-French cultural exchanges to the world.
Zao Wou-Ki once said: "I walked out of China, so that I could go to China again." "Zao Wou-Ki has a profound Chinese cultural heritage and a sense of family and country, and has devoted his life to the modern interpretation of the Chinese artistic spirit, and is an artistic model of the creative transformation and innovative development of China's excellent traditional culture.
This special exhibition brings together art institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Centre National des Beaux-Arts France, the Cernuschi Museum, the National Gallery of Singapore, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the M+ Museum of Hong Kong, the China Art Museum, the Suzhou Museum, the Deji Art Museum, the Art Museum of the China Academy of Art, Zao Wou-Ki's wife François, and important collectors from around the world.
Avenue of Wuji - Zao Wou-Ki Centennial Retrospective Special Exhibition".
A ferryman of classical Chinese and modern Western culture
Zao Wou-Ki in his Parisian studio "2909.64 and earlier versions of 2109.64》，1964
Zao Wou-Ki (1921.)2.13-2013.4.9), a native of Nantong, Jiangsu, born in Beijing, China, is a Chinese-French painter. He is known as "the most influential Chinese artist in the world", a master of modern lyrical abstraction, and one of the "Three Musketeers of France".
In 1934, at the age of 14, Zao Wou-Ki was admitted to the National Hangzhou Art College (now the China Academy of Art), where he was a student of Lin Fengmian with Wu Guanzhong and ** Qun. Born into a family of artists, Zao grew up in a liberal and tolerant family environment in the small Jiangnan city of Nantong. His erudite grandfather, his father, who collected oracle bones and Mi Fu in Yinxu, and his uncle who brought back fashion magazines and postcards of Miller's paintings from Europe, all deeply influenced his love for art.
Zao Wou-Ki's deviance and unrestricted nature prompted him to leave his hometown for Paris, where he lived in France for 63 years. He was close friends with the poet and artist Henri Michaux, and was a neighbor of the sculptor Giacometti Alberto for more than a decade, Pablo Picasso always let him visit his studio, and he was close to the famous architect I.M. Pei, who commissioned the largest painting in his life. Jacques René Chirac, a former French official, once commented that Zao Wou-Ki's works "fuse the essence of Chinese and French cultures from the depths".
10.01.68, Zao Wou-Ki 1968, oil on canvas, 82 1165 cm, **Christie's.
In France, he has gone through a complete artistic career, from the "Oracle Period" to the free-spirited "** Period", and then to the "Splash Ink Period" to break through the boundaries and accept all changes, as well as the peaceful and tranquil "Tribute" series and watercolor series of paintings in the middle and late periods.
Over the past few decades, with the change of the situation of the times and the enrichment of experience, Zao Wou-Ki has gradually developed from the fierce sense of conflict in the first abstraction to a freewheeling atmosphere that naturally emanates due to the simultaneous improvement of skill and mood.
Chinese and Western art belong to one body, there is no one other, not the work of hands and eyes, but the virtue of the best, only then can the soul be fully understood. This is what Zao Wou-Ki was taught by the first generation of artist mentors who studied abroad when he was in school. Zao Wou-Ki once explained to his students: even in the era of Fan Kuan and Mi Fu, it cannot be said that Fan Kuan and Mi Fu are Chinese painters, they are world painters, because they have developed a set of painting language that breaks through the boundaries of time and space. In a century of globalization, this understanding of "no boundaries" has long gone beyond the scope of art and has become a consensus in a larger field. Therefore, Zao Wou-Ki's work rejects tradition, breaks through boundaries, embraces everything, and transcends time and space to present the beauty of the universe without boundaries.
May Memories 1003.72", Zao Wou-Ki, 1972, oil on canvas, 200 526 cm, art**: Centre Pompidou, France.
Five sections review the master's artistic path
The tenacious vitality is the driving force of Zao Wou-Ki's lifelong creation. His works are world-renowned, and they are also visible in the art market, and his triptych "June-October 1985" was sold at Sotheby's Hong Kong Autumn Auction at 5With HK$100 million, it set a world auction record for an Asian oil painting, and the auction value of a single work is also unbeatable.
June to October 1985, Zao Wou-Ki, 1985, oil on canvas (triptych), 280 x 1000 cm
Two traditions
Zao Wou-Ki once said, "Everyone has a tradition, and I have two." ”
Zao Wou-Ki's art draws on Chinese and Western cultural traditions and is eclectic. He received traditional Chinese education and calligraphy enlightenment since childhood, and enrolled in the National Hangzhou Art School in his early years, where he was influenced by Lin Fengmian and Wu Dayu's artistic ideas of integrating Chinese and Western art, and was deeply influenced by Impressionism and paintings such as Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso.
In 1948, he went to France for further study. When he first arrived in Paris, his paintings were still expressions of life memories. In 1951, he saw Paul Klee's original work in Switzerland and had an epiphany about the potential of the creative transformation of China's excellent traditional culture. The small rectangular blocks of color, dotted with lines and symbols, are refined in a highly communicative way of encoding, and this cultural code echoes the hieroglyphs, calligraphy, and bronze inscriptions of Zao Wou-ki's childhood memories. Next, he used oracle bone inscriptions and bronze inscriptions as inspiration to create forms and spaces with imaginary calligraphy.
Festival Village, Zao Wou-Ki, 1954, oil on canvas, 965×130.5cm
My Father's Garden, Zao Wou-Ki, 1955, oil on canvas, 38x46cm
Symbiosis
a synthesis of chinese and western art
In 1957, while traveling in the United States, Zao Wou-Ki became acquainted with abstract painters such as Newman and Rothko. Abstract Expressionism expanded his horizons of painting. From 1958 onwards, he no longer named his works, but after the date on which they were completed.
In the 60s of the 20th century, he freed himself from images and characters, and responded to the gestures and chapters of cursive writing with expressionist frenzy, throwing himself into painting. At this point, his creation gradually evolved into an action of flesh and canvas struggle, and in the spontaneous writing and swaying, abstract landscape imagery gradually grew. Zao Wou-Ki sought to express movement, whether it was winding or fast, but wanted to make the picture jump through the multiple tremors of contrasting colors or monochromes.
It's like, "I use a big brush, sometimes with a knife to press the paint into the canvas, as if to make the paint penetrate more into the space, between the chaotic colors and the overlapping brushstrokes, I am at ease".
21.12.59 Zao Wou-Ki, 1959, oil on canvas, 1607x111.8cm
22.03.61 Zao Wou-ki, 1961, oil on canvas, 114x146cm
01.12.64 Zao Wou-Ki, 1964, oil on canvas, 130x89cm
Stone from another mountain
In the early 70s of the 20th century, when life was difficult, Zao Wou-Ki was encouraged by his friend Henri Michaux to regain the ink paintings that he had forgotten and been alerted to after going to Paris.
In 1972, he returned to his homeland after a 24-year absence, and the mountains and rivers of his homeland activated the spirit of traditional Chinese art deeply rooted in his heart. In the nourished images of ink and ink, and in the breathing rhythm of oil paint, his paintings incorporate an oriental connotation. In the increasingly free creation, the West and the East, power and contemplation are closely integrated.
23.05.62-07.01.71 Zao Wou-Ki, 1962-1971, oil on canvas, 114x162cm
21.02.72 Zao Wou-ki, 1972, oil on canvas, 81x100cm
Untitled, ink on paper, 1980, 96x95cm, Collection of the Art Museum of China Academy of Art.
Infinite vitality
Since 2000, Zao Wou-Ki's paintings have become more and more closely connected with nature, and the title of paintings with figurative meanings has been reinstated. "Homage to My Friend Henry Michaw" shows the meaning of the beginning of brilliance and the growth of all things. From abstraction to landscape meteorology, and back to sketching, in "The Happiness of Painting", his works in his later years are full of alcohol and vitality.
Homage to My Friend Henri Michaux, Zao Wou-Ki, 1999-2000, triptych, oil on canvas, 200x750cm
If the paint is dry, I can try to recreate all kinds of void and reality, feel the energy of the rest of my life, and express the happiness of painting that has never abandoned me. Zao Wou-Ki has always been loyal to his paintings, and his last oil painting, 1803.2008", which brings to mind the "calm flow of the air on the water" of West Lake in memory, and experiences the harmony of life in the wind.
18.03.2008, Zao Wou-ki, 2008, oil on canvas, 2008, 116x89cm
Picturesque as poesy as painting
Zao Wou-Ki's watercolors and oil paintings corroborate each other. On April 9, 2007, Zao Wou-Ki resumed his sketching with watercolor paints. The mountains, seas, flowers and trees are transformed in the rhythmic brushstrokes, and watercolor painting has become his last painting happiness.
Poetry and painting are intrinsically interrelated, and both demonstrate the spiritual power of life. Since 1949, Zao Wou-Ki has been experimenting with printmaking, and has co-created printmaking books with Western literati such as Henri Michaux, René Charles, and Claude Roy, presenting the painter's poetic heart and understanding of life through the intertextual relationship between painting and poetry.
Untitled (Ibiza), Zao Wou-ki, 2009, watercolor on paper, 80x1145cm
The artist, who is "not afraid of old age or death, as long as he can still hold a brush and apply paint, he has nothing to fear", he only hopes to have enough time to complete the painting in his hand, "to be bolder and more free than the previous one". The unity of all laws, the surging form and power of freedom all exude Zao Wou-ki's interpretation of the "formless" "image", this abstract realm of "the smallest without the inside, the largest without the outside". It is the cosmology established by the Chinese sages that it is no longer a concrete contemplation of a mountain, a river, a tree and a stone, but a macroscopic understanding and meditation on the cosmic elephant circling in the atmosphere.
Sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People's Republic of China, the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and the People's Association of Zhejiang Province, and supported by the Embassy of France in China, the Chinese Embassy in France, and the Chinese Embassy in Switzerland, the Propaganda Department of the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China, the Chinese Artists Association, the Zhejiang Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and the Zhejiang Provincial Federation of Literary and Art Circles, Organized by Zhejiang Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism, Zhejiang Provincial Department of Education, Hangzhou Municipal People**, China Academy of Art, co-organized by the Consulate General of France in Shanghai, the Institut Française and Christie's, and co-curated by the Art Museum of China Academy of Art and Zao Wou-Ki**.
Exhibition time: 20239.26-2024.2.20
Exhibition address: No. 218, Nanshan Road, Shangcheng District, Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province.
Art Museum of China Academy of Art.
Source**: China Academy of Art, Zhi Art Museum, 99 Art.
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