Zao Wou-ki’s arresting abstractions, including his world-renowned oil paintings—the sales of which have secured him the position as the top-selling living Chinese artist—have laid the foundations for the international perception of Modern Chinese art. Master of modern architecture I.M. Pei once explicitly stated, “I can say now, without any risk of exaggeration, that Zao Wou-ki is one of the greatest artists on the European scene.” Bridging the geographical and cultural divide between East and West, Zao Wou-ki seamlessly blends Chinese traditional sentiment with avant-garde European aesthetics to create compositions with international appeal for discerning collectors the world over. Employing complex layers and a unique mastery of calligraphic technique, Zao’s work presents a singular visualization of light, shadow, and color.

Drawing from a rich cultural history, Zao Wou-ki returns to Chinese painters from the Sung and Yuan dynasties such as Fan Kuan, Zhao Mengfu, and Mi Fu, who focused on capturing the essence of nature through a more impressionist style of ink painting. Captivated by these technical masters, Zao Wou-ki extended this tradition into the 20th and 21st centuries by melding this ideal with an Abstract Expressionist application of color and manipulation of light. Just as with the Sung and Yuan masters whom he admires, Zao early on sought a new form of expressing nature. With these intentions, Zao once explained that he disliked the Chinese term for landscape (shanshui, literally “mountain, water”) as too restrictive. “I prefer the word ‘nature’,” Zao said, “because it calls into being a much broader world: the intersection of multiple spaces in a painting creates something like a universe, in which the wind and the atmosphere breathe and flow freely.” This artistic universe clearly radiates from each of Zao’s intensely layered compositions, where the varying tones and rhythmic lines converge to recall imaginative landscapes, capturing the flowing energies of nature and the surrounding atmosphere. For Zao, establishing this harmonious balance was a matter of artistic approach, as he lectures in his autobiography:

"When you begin a new painting, ideally you should not start in the middle of the canvas, because that will make it almost impossible to determine the center’s relationship to the rest of the composition. It is better to set out with an eye for the complete layout, overall structures. Colors, too, can never be used on their own; every hue and shade is connected to all other tones. The fact is that every single brushstroke has far-reaching implications for the entire painting, and you should not apply a single fleck of paint without keeping in mind the organic whole that you are about to create."

It is this "organic whole" which emanates from each of the artist’s compositions, encapsulating the sensory perception of a landscape energy within a formless abstraction.

The current lot, Sans Titre, demonstrates the artist’s early efforts to explore this sense of nature and landscape through watercolor, a medium more closely linked to the Chinese literati tradition than Zao’s more common expressions in oil paint. Zao’s acute attention to color and the reliance and relation of each tone and hue is exhibited in the stunning layers of varying tones within the present, untitled lot.

Washes of ink converge in cloudy pools of blue, green, and greyish brown, spreading across the paper, emphasizing the texture of the medium along with the subtle variations in the ink itself. Already forming an abstract landscape of undulating color, Zao further links this composition with Chinese tradition by creating structural figurative elements in finely applied lines of delicate black. Mountains form from the spindled lines, along with houses, humans, and animals, while symbols reminiscent of ancient Chinese oracle bone characters dance along the bottom of the paper. Painted in 1953, at the same time as Zao was exploring the architectural urban landscapes around him in Paris and other European cities, the present lot demonstrates the artist’s efforts to bring the cultural aesthetics of Chinese tradition into modernist Western movements.

A stunning example of Zao Wou-ki’s early efforts with both watercolor and early abstractions of landscape, the present lot exhibits the undeniable emotional appeal inherent to all of Zao’s works. When establishing the aesthetic which has propelled him to the forefront of Chinese Modern art, Zao claimed, “what I was really looking for was space, how it develops and folds, and I was groping for an idea in my mind, which was, How to paint the wind? How to express emptiness? How to convey the brilliance and purity of light?”