Zao Wou-ki departed for his new home in France at the precise moment when the

painters of the European abstract and American abstract expressionist schools

began to flourish. Zao began producing abstract works himself around 1954,
employing symbols and motifs with a mysterious eastern ambiance that float amid
the spaces and shifting tonalities of his paintings, suggesting ancient oracle-
bone inscriptions or the patterns on bronze tripods. Zao's work utilizing such
themes and images first began attracting widespread attention in the mid-1950s, as
the West acknowledged Zao's Chinese background while also beginning to sense his
broader appeal. Zao's symbolic motifs would later gradually disappear, to be
replaced by large areas of color applied with free brushwork. During this later
phase, Zao created a number of works on the theme of "the four elements." These
include his 1954 Wind, the 1956 Wind and Dust, and Fire from the 1954-55 period.
Appearing at sale for the first time, Zao's Et la terre était sans forme , belongs
to the "earth" segment of this "earth, air, fire, and water" series.

The Chinese culture and its use of pictographic characters had ideas similar to
the ancient notion of "the four elements," the inspiration for Zao's Et la terre
était sans forme. In the Eastern Han period, Xu Shen (c. 58-147) wrote an
"Analysis of Chinese Characters" that explained their structures by means of the
five elements of nature, as well as Ying-Yang dualism and the Zhou Dynasty Book of
Changes. The five elements, in Chinese thinking, reflected the seasons: Spring,
when trees and grass grow, became "wood"; summer's hot sun became "fire"; the
harvests of the fall with their gold became "metal"; the frozen waters of winter
were "water." The seasons themselves and their transitions were "earth." The
theory of the five elements in China therefore holds that everything in the
universe is formed from by movements and changes in the elements of wood, water,
earth, metal, and fire. Those elements originated in the four seasons, which
themselves reflect the motion of the universe, and taken as a whole, the "five
elements" theory describes the structures and the movements of all things. If the
Chinese theory of Yin and Yang was an ancient way of unifying opposing forces, the
five elements can be seen as a kind of primitive "general systems theory." Zao's
work here uses five fundamental colors, blue, red, yellow, white, and black, to
express the appearance of the primal earth; the five tones represent the deep
blue-green of woods, the red of blood, the yellows of the earth, and the black and
white of day and night. These five colors, red, yellow, and blue plus black and
white, are the original, primary colors, and in orthodox Chinese thought, they are
"cardinal colors." They represent north, south, east, west, and center as well as
the five elements and their extension in the "ten heavenly stems" of the Chinese
system of historical dates and numerology.

In the 1950s Zao began adding images of the ancient oracle-bone inscriptions to
his impressionistic spaces, melding the forms of western painting and the
tradition of the East at a basic level. Such ancient inscriptions are basic to the
abstract structure his Et la terre était sans forme. The early totemistic symbols
that became Chinese pictographic characters have a life and an aesthetic appeal of
their own. Xu Shen's "Analysis of Characters" describes how those pictographs
"drew the object, twisting to follow its form," which is to say, the basic
outlines of objects were captured in the simple brushstrokes that become Chinese
characters, which depict the entire object or a representative part of it from a
particular angle. The Chinese have an age-old tradition of adding written
characters to paintings, which Zao continues in this work in a fresh medium. This
idea has had parallels in other cultures, in some Islamic societies for example,
which because of their prohibition of idols and images, used text and characters
as the medium for conveying spiritual insights. That gave written characters a
special standing in their cultures, and their painting techniques were based on
elegant variations of written characters, which developed rich and complex forms.
Calligraphy was used in copying manuscripts and also became an important feature
of their architecture and other ornamentations. In Europe, copying religious
writings also encouraged the development of handwritten characters, but following
the invention and spread of the printing press, calligraphy scripts began to fall
into disuse around the 15th century. Western art thereafter focused its attention
on image, form, color, and light.

The early paintings of the Chinese literati, however, often took poems as their
central inspiration and subordinated the painting's expression to that of the poem
in an amalgamated work with a highly poetic atmosphere. Following Wang Wei's
creation of the form, Su Dongpo was the first poet to use the term "paintings of
the intelligentsia" (or "literati paintings"). Those painters sought paintings to
create a semblance of their subjects and to create strong links between the poetic
subject, the style of calligraphy used in the poem, and the painting's content. Su
Dongpo was deeply impressed by one of Wang Wei's great poems in the five-character
per line form, "In the Mountains": "White rocks in blue-green fields, sparse
leaves of red maple by the jade river; no rain on this mountain road, but damp air
that wets our clothes." Su excitedly noted how "Wang Wei's poem contains a
painting; looking at the painting, we see a poem." Zao Wouki, in his own way,
melds written characters with the images and compositions of his works. His
compositions, however, which go far beyond language, are not expressions of the
written word, and neither are they conceptual pieces. Once created, they are
simply themselves, with a life of their own.

In February 1948, 28-year old Zao Wouki left Shanghai on the ocean liner "Andre Le
Pen"; by strange coincidence, his teacher Lin Fengmian had once boarded this same
old passenger ship on his own journey to France. Zao arrived in Paris 36 days
later, by way of Marseille, with US$30,000 provided by his father for tuition and
expenses. Zao busied himself learning French, painting, exchanging ideas with
artists from around the world, and in general absorbing all the western artistic
culture Paris had to offer. In earlier days in China, Zao had copied works by the
great Cubist Picasso, hardly suspecting that one day he would work in a studio not
far from that master's own studio in southern France. Zao was lucky, too, in
enjoying the excellent friendship of painters such as Miro and Matisse, and he
later enjoyed cooperation with a gallery operated by Matisse's son. In addition to
that, for 17 years he also worked near the studio of sculptor Alaberto Giacometti.
Untitled and Lac de Geneve both date from 1950; few Zao Wouki works from that
early period are available today. These works feature palettes of soft, elegant
color with subtle gradations in shading that reveal the influence of great French
painters of Zao's acquaintance: Picasso's structure, Matisse's color, and Miro's
free imagination each enhance his ability to handle spatial effects with skill and
freedom. Also during 1950s, Zao participated in a Berne exhibition where
discovered another artist influenced by Chinese culture, Paul Klee. The deep
affinity he felt for the inner spaces portrayed by Klee provided a further
stimulus for his own art. Klee believed that an artist must let his works move
beyond what is visible to the eye, and that the effect of that kind of
trascendence was fundamental to the artist's inner world. Perhaps for this reason,
Zao's glimpse of Klee's work sparked a deep response.

On a 1957 trip to the US, Zao spent a period of time in close association with
American abstract expressionist artists that would prove to be influential. In the
process of deepening his awareness of great western art, he continued to unlock
the greatness of eastern culture. While he abandoned the representational elements
of his painting, his work retained an eastern sense of closeness to nature. In the
paintings of Zao Wou-ki, nature appears as a distant, hazy presence, expressed in
essence rather than in concrete images or scenic elements; the viewer feels and
senses the universe through their implied meanings. After his 1958 work Nuages,
Zao no longer gave names to his works but simply inscribed them with the date of
their production. In his paintings during the following decade he developed a
deeper and more mysterious palette of colors, believing that only color was
capable of evoking his feelings, implications, and metaphorical meanings in the
kind of limitless flat spaces his canvases create. His works departed ever further
from any sense of narration or depiction and became more direct expressions of
spirit and feeling as his style continued to mature.

If Zao had been led to Paris by the dream of developing his artistic ability, it
was also Paris that led him to rediscover China as a fountainhead of his art. As
time went on and his style matured, his works partook more and more of a
mysterious eastern ambience. They express his sharply intuitive sense of nature
with movements like clouds and flowing water and help us achieve a forgetfulness
of self and a sense of man in union with nature. His paintings are novel and
stylistically unique in the way they express eastern aesthetics within a western
abstract form, and in so doing they create a bridge between the cultures of east
and west. Zao once commented that "we all obey some kind of tradition, but I obey
the call of two traditions…Paris had an undeniable influence on my artistic
growth, but as my gained deeper insights, I also gradually rediscovered China.
This return to my own distant source is something I actually owe to Paris." Zao
also said, "Cezanne helped me understand the Chinese view of nature and regain my
identity as a Chinese artist." Cezanne believed that nothing nature shows us is
permanent, that it all will disappear. But the artist, recording nature's various
qualities and features, must retain a grasp on those elements that are lasting and
eternal. Beginning with Cezanne, western artists began to turn from seeking direct
depictions of nature and toward expressing the self, and all kinds of formalist
schools sprang up and became the mainstream of modern art. Zao possibly felt
similar influences, as in his works images are expressed in the contrasts of his
lines, bright and dark tones, and colors, and the size and scale of objects grow
out of the correct interactions of different tones. For Zao, painting also does
not mean blindly reproducing external reality, but searching for harmonious
relationships.

In "An Appraisal of Zao Wou-ki's Paintings," Nobel Prize laureate Gao Xingjian
wrote, "Once an artist of achievement finds his own path, then immediately the
debate begins about tradition versus westernization. We can leave that debate for
those who find it meaningful." Zao's works reflect his travels along a path from
deep enthusiasm for western abstraction and toward a return to the Chinese
tradition, a return he made based on his very high philosophical and artistic
perspective. Within the rich oil colors he applies with such verve we can lose
ourselves in a sense of eastern harmony, though his brush quite naturally reveals
the influence of the decades he spent abroad, along with a sense of western
romanticism.

Zao also reveals his Chinese background in comments on poetry and painting: "In
the Chinese tradition, poetry and painting were so connected that the empty spaces
in paintings were often filled with verse. I loved poetry as a boy and began
writing it as soon as I learned my first Chinese characters. Poetry and art are
essentially the same as they both express the "chi" of life, whether through the
flick of the brush over the painting or the motions of the hand as the characters
take shape on the paper. These movements cannot be reproduced because they
originate with us; they reflect our hidden thoughts and the hidden thoughts of the
universe. Since 1950, I've always agreed whenever a publisher or a poet wants to
make my painting part of such a combination. What I like most in poetry is the
feeling of freedom when every word finds its own place as part of an ordered
whole; the words amble carefree, then stop, turn and take a breath. When we pause
at some point in our reading, that moment is a moment of peace and beauty, just
the same as the spaces in a painting." Zao reflects this point of view everywhere
in his work: whether in his early representative paintings in a style akin to
Klee's, or in the surging, exhilarating works of his later abstract expressionist
style, the beauty of the poetic conception is always present. The viewer is free
to inject himself and his imagination into the creation, making it part of his own
meditations on life, which is precisely how art is meant to affect human beings as
it touches and purifies us.

The strong influence of Zao Wou-ki's native culture can be felt in his emphasis on
harmony, in the pleasing sense of the natural movements of clouds and flowing
water, and in his understanding of the world of the image. Zao gave his colors the
flowing quality of inks in Chinese painting by thinning his pigments heavily with
turpentine. Zao's brushwork style can be seen in two works, 8.2.72 and 17.4.64,
with their swift and intense applications of color reminiscent of the vigorous
"hemp fiber strokes" of classical Chinese landscape painting. The composition of
17.4.64 employs a layout suggesting the painters of the Northern Song in their
powerful depictions of lofty mountains and broad rivers, though there is fine
detail within the broader sweep of the painting. From the 1960s through the early
'70s, Zao used a basic palette heavy with black and brown tones in his canvases,
which had a strong sense of movement. A gradual shift followed that moved his work
toward more lively colors, even more adroit handling of light and space, and an
atmosphere of greater tranquility: the artist seems to breathe his soul into the
painting with ease and consummate skill. In 8.2.72, forms emerge effortlessly from
space through Zao's incisive brushstrokes and blocks of color and the painting's
breadth of vision seems almost to encompass the universe itself. 8.2.72 features
rich layering, vigorous brushwork, and vivid lines, along with colors with almost
the strength and concentration of black.

8.2.72 suggests a magnificent fresco from the Middle Ages, its composition formed
entirely from lines and washes of colour as in a Chinese painting. As the artist
discovered, color is simply a visual response created when the eye and brain
perceive and respond to information, a response that is conditioned by our life
experiences. Colour is a purely optical phenomenon derived from the visual
sensations; it is not the actual object and has little significance of its own,
and does not relate to ideas of perspective or atmosphere. Once the artist
discovers this, the question that presents itself is how to recreate, in the
blocks of color on the canvas, information can be meaningfully distinguished and
interpreted by the viewer's eyes. Zao engaged in constant observation in order to
find organization within the chaos of visual information, and today we can see in
a work such as 9.3.65 how he organizes the energetic impressions in these blue
tones for a perceptive experience suggesting the forms of nature and the effects
of its light.

Plato's concept of idealized forms can also bring us closer to an understanding of

Zao's works from this period: Plato believed that our sensations of the real world
were only reflections, shadows of a world that exists on a higher plane. Plato's
metaphysics thus divides the world into two distinct spheres: the world we
perceive and an intellectual world of pure forms. As we embark on the mental
journey through a Zao Wouki painting, we realize that as he abandoned
representative images he drew closer to the intellectual world of pure, idealized
forms. If our world is recreated from such a world of ideas and pure forms, then
our world contains no perfect forms. The forms Zao depicts are perhaps even closer
to the unalterable perfection of that other world, though we must use our
knowledge and understanding to perceive them. These concepts also appear in
Zoroastrian philosophy with its distinctions between the worlds of Minu, "the
mind," and Giti, "perception." For Plato, the idealized forms that existed in that
higher world were the only real sources of light. Planes of color, lines, and
compositions are the media Zao Wou-ki employs to stimulate our perceptions and
create a path for the viewer toward a greater intelligence. 12.2.69 exemplifies
this kind of work, in which the artist employs shifts in color tonalities in place
of direct modeling of forms. The rhythmic interplay of these shifting tones takes
precedence over the creation of forms, and Zao brings these areas of color into
unity more through such relationships than through the overall compositional
structure.