Zao Wou-ki once said, "All my paintings, from the smallest to the very biggest, are pieces of a larger picture, a 'dream place' [where true harmony is achieved]." Through his heightened perception, the artist may roam and travel in spheres that are invisible to most of us; the eyes of his soul can penetrate the veils of the unknown, and his boundless insight and imagination transcend the limitations of convention and vulgarity. Zao's art is not free from contradictions and doubts, yet his lust for life and lifelong devotion to—indeed, intoxication with—art and creativity provided enduring impetus to the pursuit of his dreams, giving him the courage to paint spiritual landscapes both mysterious and beautiful, places that never fail to make us feel peaceful and at home.

The years around 1970 were a time of many changes and departures in Zao Wou-ki's life. He returned to China for several visits after a long absence from his native country. On an even more personal note, he had to deal with the successive deaths of his wife, May, and his old mother back in China. As an artist, his way of coping was to paint, processing his experiences through creative expression. This helped him to recover piece of mind, and his work, which for a period of time had been dominated by grey hues and subliminal disconsolation, gradually took on a much lighter and tranquil quality. Ridding his compositions of all unnecessary structural and representational elements, and abandoning the immensely forceful brushstrokes of the past, he shifted towards a new and simpler style marked by subtler textures and quieter shades, and softly reminiscent of the Chinese ink and wash tradition. In other words, the artist's explorations of abstract painting had entered a new phase.

Art critics agree that after 1973, Zao developed a markedly different style. Under the influence of ink and wash painting, a more relaxed and expansive approach surfaced, purged of most disruptive elements and throbbing with gentle rhythms and harmonies, using the canvas to show infinite mystical spaces. Diluting the oil paint with turpentine, the artist achieved a deliberately "hazy" effect with colors blending and running into each other for softer contours and ethereal shapes. As in traditional splashed ink painting, the spaces left empty and the things only hinted at, or subtly implied, are just as important as what immediately meets the eye. At the same time, lighter strokes and a drier brush bring out even the finest variations of shade and texture, creating roughly cast yet delicately executed vistas, rugged and bold but also full of elegance and sophistication: Zao had found a way of expressing the profound lyricism and expansive poesy of Chinese landscape painting in oil painting, an essentially Occidental art form. This may go a long way in explaining the praise and admiration lavished on Zao Wou-ki by many Western art critics and poets, who were simply stunned by the artist's unique and highly successful fusion of East and West.

In his foreword to the catalogue of the 1977 Zao Wou-ki exhibition at the Galerie de France, French poet René Char wrote the following lines that filled Zao with the joy of knowing that here was someone who truly appreciated his work: "The canvas is pulsating with an Orphean vision that penetrates the most elusive mysteries, both down-to-earth and heavenly inspired. Looking at the roiling sceneries set before us, we see a sea of infinite possibilities constantly generating new meaning. It is like looking at a vibrant landscape at dusk, at the precise moment when the last rays of sunshine, faint and fleeting, pierce our perception with the most poignant sense of beauty." ("Là perece le sortilège aérien et tellurique d'Orphée voyageur. Tous les éléments qui composent l'oeuvre produisent entre eux d'une manière continue. Comme ligne de démarcation passagère, celle au soir du partage des couleurs dans un mélange tumultueux.") (Zao Wou-ki & Françoise Marquet, Autoportrait, Fayard, Paris, 1986, p. 158) That moment, however transient, is eternity. One is reminded of the words of Wu Dayu, one of Zao's teachers at the Hangzhou College of Arts (now China Academy of Art): "Painting is the artist's response to nature, and offers a fleeting glimpse of universal truth." How true this rings, especially with regard to Zao's art!

This lot, "11.10.78," was completed in 1978, and from the picture's fee-flowing and fairly uncomplicated composition it would seem that at the time the artist was still bathing in the joy of his young marriage to Françoise Marquet. She was a curator at the Musé d'Art Moderne de Ville de Paris when Zao met her, and they had known each other for four years when they got married in 1977. It was a happy union of two like-minded spirits, and very likely one of the inspirations for the gentler, very self-assured and unobtrusively elegant approach seen in "11.10.78." As so many of Zao's works, this lot can be seen as an ingenious exploration of space and light: the foreground features sweeping planes of flatly applied color with occasional splashes of darker shades, spawning an atmosphere of enigmatic proportions, a panoramic view permeated by a whirling, vague complexity that is lurking just below the surface of its misty, vapory expanses. The bulkier elements in the painting's upper part, which are kept in light brown and ocher tones, create a sort of watershed, dividing the composition into two halves that are yet intimately connected through faint patches of white, done with light strokes with a half-dry brush. It is as if all things under the sun have somehow found a place in these primeval swathes of existence, and the observer is invited to give free reign to his poetic imagination.

The foreground with its intimations of a vast lake, shrouded in mist and undulating in tiny ripples of hidden energy, merges perfectly with the background, which has all the grandeur of scudding wracks of clouds at sunset—like yin and yang, they are inseparably interlocked, fused through the rich layers of variegated color. Lighter, ephemeral shades are mingled with darker, more solid ones as the artist's thoughts and ideas become manifest on the canvas, which is really his space for pursuing the wildest dreams, for capturing moments of "universal truth." Viewing existence and emptiness not as opposites, but simply two sides of the same coin, Zao is able to conjure up abstract vistas that are brimming with the understated aesthetics of traditional Chinese landscapes. This is why his work, and "11.10.78" in particular, merits repeated viewings: it has a philosophical charm that never grows old.