Bulletin Autumn‧Winter 1993

CITATIONS Seven years later, the lure o f Paris became irresistible to one who was an ardent admirer of the Impressionist school of painting, and Zao Wou - k i boarded a steamer in Shanghai and headed for France. He arrived in Paris on Ap r i l Fool's Day and, as legend would have it, promptly disappeared into the Louvre to see for himself the actual paintings which he had first seen on his uncle's postcards. As Andr é Malraux observed in Mus é e imaginaire, our era is the first to be confronted with the art of all time and all continents, and the confrontation takes place daily in the Louvre and other French museums. Zao relished the experience and thrived on it. He travelled extensively around Europe and immersed himself in the culture of the Occident with almost total abandon. Martine Contensou wrote, i n her piece on Zao Wou- k i entitled Life into Work, that at this point in his career 'he developed a passion for the nude'. But that was not all. The Chinese painter was also turning his attention to European landscapes, Western taste and theories of art and radically different approaches to painting. The transformation of Zao Wou - k i was immediate and refreshing. His flowing oriental lines and strokes, combined with occidenta l colours and structures, made his paintings unique and extremely appealing. He won the first prize in a sketch competition in 1949 and held his first exhibition in Paris at the Galerie Creuze in the same year. His reputation began to spread and he made many friends in the French intellectual and artistic community, especially among some of the leading exponents of the Lyrical-Abstract Movement. A rt historians are fond of classifying artists' works into periods such as the Blue Period and the Greek Period o f Picasso. And so, Zao Wou-ki' s work from 1949 to 1954 or, to be more precise, before 1954 is often referred to as his Figurative Period. This was when his paintings still looked like the objects of the artist's attention. O f Zao's work during this period, which is best represented by Arezzo, Piazza and Bateaux, the art critic and historian Fran ç ois Cheng said, 'What stands out is the line, because the images have been reduced to their bare f r a m e . . . Lines flow across the landscape, directing the movement without restricting its energy, delimiting fields without closing them off . They give the landscapes an effect of lightness, as i f they were ready at any moment to take flight (like boats at rest that still seem restless).' The next period o f his painting was very controversial t o begin with as Zao Wou-ki his familiar light and airy style and threw himself, head first, into abstract painting. Flat rectangular strokes appeared and took over from the refined, round strokes of earlier paintings; signs replaced pictures; and finally, f r om 1958 onward, completion dates served in lieu of names of paintings. Few recognized it at the time, bu t today this dramatic change on the part of the artist is generally regarded as his attempt 46th Congregation 13