Zao wou ki biography graphic organizers

I work obsessively to project in my paintings the image of the universe that I feel inside me until I can arrive at a perception which always seems to elude me, Zao Wou-Ki said of himself

Art belongs to the realm of the mysterious. It is something that has to draw people in, create a rapport, go beyond the individual. Zao Wou-Ki’s painting has to do with existence, not history, it allows him to live and to make full use of the emotions he feels as he paints, the result of an internal struggle. The pictorial signifier is not a story. In his painting, there is something sacred that defies analysis.

An escape of the soul? Undoubtedly… Zao Wou-Ki develops this spiritual requirement of Man.

In his Indian inks and watercolours, the mesh of streaks and marks and the riot of the colours work in harmony to create the work, in keeping with this principle of inner necessity. He lifts us up and carries us off in the whirlwind of his landscapes to experience the persistent rhythm of the wind with all the light it carries, the rhythm of its course, of its surprises, of the colours, of the breeze, of the intensity of fire and the calm of water.

The overall unity of his work does not come from the images that it represents but from the subtlety of juxtapositions, combinations of reflections which are on the verge of metamorphosis, patches of silence, and gentle, diffused, sunny vibrations.

In abstract art, it is no longer the subject of the emotion, but the emotion itself, which is the theme of the painting. Abandoning representation does not mean abandoning meaning, or the expression which conveys the meaning.

In total surrender to his inner vision, Zao Wou-Ki steers us, like a magician of light, toward his hidden kingdoms. He guides our gaze as it wanders from one perception to another. Transformed into a traveller, it is involved in the process because it makes guesses and uses imagination.

His painting is poetry without words.

Curator: A

"Abstraction in art is no more abstract than isolated words in literature" (London: The Studio, 1962)

Zao Wou-Ki is one of trhe most important of the group of lyrical abstractionists active in France from the 1950s on. He was a teen ager in art school in China when the Japanese invasion forced him to leave art school. After the war, he organized several exhibitions of non-traditional Chinese art in China while working on his own painting. He came to Paris in 1948, and spent the afternoon of his first day at the Louvre. He became part of a group (along with Hans Hartung, Nicolas de Staël, Pierre Soulages, Viera da Silva, Sam Francis, Norman Bluhm and Jean-Paul Riopelle) that often met at the Galerie Nina Dausset, rue du Dragon. During the 1960s, during his trapis to the US, he became friends with Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, William Baziotes, Saul Steinberg, and Hans Hoffman. His first exhibition at Galerie Creuze in May 1949 was praised by Mirò, Giacometti, and Picasso. After learning lithography at the Desjobert printing shop, he began producing lithographs; inspired by his lithographs, the writer and artist Henri Michaux wrote a series of eight poems that began a close friendship with the artist. His poetry was published as Lecture de huit lithographies de Zao Wou Ki and the two had a joint exhibition at the galerie La Hune in 1950. Recognition of his work was widespread and his works were widely shown in Europe and the US during the next four decades, including major shows at galleries and museums in Paris, London, Bern, Basel, Lisbon, Luxembourg, Essen, Amsterdam, Geneva, Salzburg, Rome, Milan, Turin, Oslo, Helsinki, Tokyo, Madrid, Cordoba, Montreal, Cambridge MA (at M.I.T. and the Hayden Gallery), Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.

Among his most important shows, the following stand out: a retrospective of his engravings at The Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts (1954); a retrospecti