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The Alchemy of East and West
From the beginning of the 20th Century Chinese artists have sought to combine traditional Chinese visual culture and Western Modern Art movements. This quest has generated some exceptional Chinese masters.

Zao Wou-Ki: Painting Moods
Successfully bridging East and West, Zao Wou-Ki is famous for his lyrical abstract paintings inspired by classical Chinese brush work paintings, Chinese ink calligraphy, ancient script characters and Western abstract and symbolist art which he came across during his studies in France. When he arrived in Paris in 1948 he was already familiar with the work of great Western artists of the modern era such as Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. However, Zao’s arrival also coincided with the advent of a new style, Abstract Expressionism: its spontaneity and natural free-flowing style not dissimilar to that of traditional Chinese philosophy made it easy for Zao to embrace. Zao’s style really came into its own after his meeting with Paul Klee in Switzerland in 1951. Inspired by Eastern art, Klee’s energy, poetry and spatial effects ‘dazzled’ Zao and paved the way for his own, unique painterly style.

Vent et Poussière and Nous deux (pictured) are two rare early works of the artist, revealing how the artist abandoned the pure structure of characters, landscape and still life to invent his now well-known distinctive style of painting.

His paintings are heavily encrusted which he achieves by layering on paint with a palette knife in the tradition of Gustave Courbet and Paul Cézanne, and then scraping the excess off the canvas with the wooden handle of the brush, and in doing so creating fine lines in the midst of broad brushstrokes, and enriching the textural beauty of his work. His alternately rough, intense, imposing brushwork spread across the surface like bursts of light, waves of water, expanses of sky and terrains of earth.

These works demonstrate Zao’s ability as a pioneer of fusion, combining Eastern and Western aesthetics. Moreover, they are incredibly unique examples of Zao’s work, so much so that owners of such works rarely part with them.

Sanyu: Salon Days
Sanyu is nowadays a renowned and much sought-after artist. However, during his life Sanyu only achieved limited success and lived a life of bohemian poverty.

Sanyu was born in Nanchong, Sichuan Province, on 14 October 1901. In 1921, at the tender age of 20, he travelled to Paris as one of the many students who, following the 4th of May revolt, decided to travel abroad to learn the ways of the West. For the first 8 years he stayed close to his original skills, using ink and brush to sketch the rich plethora of subjects surrounding him in this totally new environment. He especially enjoyed the nude drawing classes he took; an opportunity not available to artist back home. Only at the end of the 1920s did he eventually foray into oil painting. His earliest oil painting is dated 1929. Sanyu gained entrance to the Salon des Tuileries in 1930 and for the first time exhibited an oil painting, instead of the nude and still life drawings selected for previous salon exhibitions. By the early 1930s Sanyu was fully committed to oil painting, returning to drawings only as study sketches for his works in oil.

Sanyu’s oil paintings are often compared with Matisse, which is understandable given the use of bold colour planes, the fluid black contours of his subjects and the lack of perspectival space. However, whilst Sanyu will most certainly have been influenced by the work of Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani, his work is also very much a development from his Chinese education in calligraphy and painting. We can see this in his ability to capture the essence of a subject in just a few brush strokes as well his use of distinctly oriental tones and the addition of Chinese ideograms and calligraphy to his compositions. Another characteristic of Sanyu’s paintings, whether still lifes, animal paintings or landscapes, they all carry an emotional gravitas, which reflect Sanyu’s own emotional landscape of solitude, austerity and even desolation.

Cat and Birds is a playful composition of a mother bird who is feeding her chicks in the nest whilst a hungry brindle cat is observing them from the bottom of the potted prunus. To create this composition, Sanyu most likely used animal sculptures he had created. The extraordinary hue of the dark brown background contrasts with the playfulness and liveliness of the composition, and imbues it with a sense of danger and dark foreboding. Moreover, with his choice of tones as well as the use of Chinese ideograms and emblems on the table cloth, which resemble petals, and the calligraphy on the pot, Sanyu firmly places his painting in the Chinese tradition. This painting was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in the Grand Palais in Paris in 1955.

Wu Dayu: Abstract Pioneer
Wu Dayu (1903-1988) was another pioneering Chinese artist who studied in France in the early 1920s. Whilst Sanyu never returned, Wu Dayu returned to China in 1927 intent on revitalizing Chinese traditional art through the injection of western influences.

Wu broke away from the then mainstream approach of classical realism and instead created a non-figurative style in which he used colour, line and structure to convey his impressions and emotions. In Untitled-16, the painter confidently and creatively structures colour and lines on canvas, rich layers of colour creates an intense rhythmic composition reflecting artist’s poetic feeling and power of innovation.

As a pioneer of abstract art in China, Wu became the inspiration for many subsequent Chinese artists such as Wu Guanzhong and Zao Wou-Ki to develop Chinese art into new directions.