Bulletin Autumn‧Winter 1993

C l T A T I O NS to fuse the two great cultural and artistic traditions of the East and theWest, one Chinese, the other European. The first reaction of the public was disappointin g — his dealer Galerie Pierre failed to sell any painting by Zao Wou-ki for two years. But Zao persisted until, with the painting of Homage to Edgar Var è se in 1964 and Nous deux encore in 1972, the greatness of the artist and his art was finally recognized. From 1972, his reputation in the Western art world assured, Zao Wou-ki would return to his roots and experiment, once again, with Chinese wash drawing and, in the words of the art critic Daniel Abadie, 'placedit face-to-face with the modem languag e it had failed to create for itself.' Abadie went on to say that Zao Wou-ki's wash drawings were 'not a pastime secondary to the main body of his painting, but its culmination.' Fran ç ois Cheng goes further. In praising Zao Wou-ki and his art, Cheng has written, 'A long period of waiting seems to come to an end. Chinese painting had been waiting for more than a century; now for the first time a new symbiosis is achieved, one that always seemed destined to occur between China and the West.' Thanks to Zao Wou-ki, the hundred years of solitude and waiting in the Chinese art world was over in the 1970s. A new era of fusion, fission and frenetic creativity had begun. His pioneering role in all this was quickly and universally recognized. In 1981, Paris, the city of his choosing, paid homage to him with an exhibitio n of his wor k at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais. In 1983 , China, the country of his birth, mounted a similar exhibition at the Fine Arts Museum in Beijing. Two years later his professional life came full circle when he was invited t o serve as honorary professor at the National School of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. This is the school where he had studied a s a teenager and where the portrait of the artist as a young man firs t took shape. Today ZaoWou-ki's paintings and wash drawings gracemany galleries, exhibition halls, and private collections around the world. There have been more tha n 160 exhibitions. His works hang on the walls of the Tate Gallery, the Victoria an d Albert Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Mus é e National d ' Art Moderne in Paris and another 45 or so museums and art galleries in all six continents. His first biograph y appeared as early as 1957 and since then he has been a subject o f serious academic study in no less than 20 publications and almost as many languages. Mr. Chancellor, for his work as an artist, painter and innovator par excellence, for his attempt to fuse the two great artistic traditions — European and Chinese — for the boldness of his strokes and the delicacy of his mind, for his effort in achieving art 'without bounds' as his Chinese name suggests, I present Zao Wou-ki for the award of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa. 46th Congregation 14