Immediately after his 1950s "oracle-bone" period, Zao in the '60s embarked on a key new creative phase. In this period, his lines and colors come ever closer to expressing the feeling for nature and the universe found in traditional Chinese landscapes. Zao Wou-ki's paitnings remind us of what we find in nature: mists drifting among mountain slopes, the light and shadow within rising vapors, the sighing of the wind, or the ripples raised as it brushes across the surface of water. 21.10.66 (Lot 1101) embodies the creative thrust of Zao's work during this period, though with even finer color layering and spatial presentation. The year 1966 found Zao Wou-ki engaging in two types of creative experiments. The first was the imitation of the Chinese screen painting and scroll painting forms, and the creation of triptychs presenting a continuous space. The second is shown in this 21.10.66, which was created in the form of a "tondo," or circular painting, and which was shown at the "Zao Wou-ki-Recent Works" exhibition at Galerie de France, Paris. Current documentary evidence shows that Zao Wou-ki created only four such tondos, each of which was begun in 1966. One remained in the collection of the artist's family. 21.10.66 is another example, which has for nearly 50 years been held by an American collector, and is now the first such circular painting by Zao Wou-ki to appear at auction.
Circular paintings, or tondos, have appeared at times in both Eastern and Western art history. There are numerous examples from the Renaissance in the West, typically dealing with religious themes, the most famous of which is Raphael's Madonna and Child. In the East, tondos were frequently seen during the Song Dynasty (Fig. 1), or in ink-wash paintings in the form of circular fans. Circular paintings, in fact, penetrated into just about every area of Chinese culture: the circle was a symbolic motif that represented the heavens; the jade used in offerings, for example, had to be circular. There was also the notion that a theory from which some examples of Chinese architecture were developed, such as the Temple of Heaven (Tian Tan) in Beijing. Another dictum, "the form of the Absolute is round" ("tai ji wei yuan ") referred to the state of things in the primordial chaos before the world began; in this sense the circle, which could be completed with one stroke of the brush, represented "one," or the source of all life, as well as its ideal harmony and fulfillment. Kong Yingda, in his "The Correct Meaning of the Book of Change," wrote, "That which is round is not exhausted by movement, which means that that which is unified within itself does not come to an end." The cosmos was described as a ring, circling unceasingly and flowing throughout the ages. "Circular" therefore also represented the unceasingly life and the self-sufficient state of the universe. The circle, for the Chinese, thus represented a view of the divine order of nature, the spirit of life, and the ideals of the artistic realm.
All of these concepts suggest two ideas about Zao's purpose in creating these tondos. In their themes, he felt he was portraying the natural dynamic of the cosmos, which is to say, what the Chinese think of as "the Tao," or "nature's essence." The view of a natural order in the cosmos was the lens through which the Chinese people observed all things, and it was how they thought about their own personal state of being in relation to the world. It can be thought of as a form of religious belief, on a par in their culture with, say, Catholicism in the West. The natural landscape, in Chinese art, inspired ideas about life's value and the meaning of the cosmos, which has implications for the way Zao shapes his work into a circle in 21.10.66. Beginning from the 1950s, Zao did in fact use his art to communicate ideas from Chinese culture, reflecting distinctly the mental realms that the Chinese inhabit. 21.10.66 can be seen as one embodiment of this creative purpose.
From a more purely aesthetic point of view, depicting a natural scene within a circular space to allowed Zao Wou-ki to establish a completely new kind of spatial presentation. The turbulent energies of nature seen in this tondo suggest a view of the Earth as seen from outer space and the grand vista of clouds scuttling across its surface (Fig. 2). Zao's masterful application of the pigments, and the direction of his brushstrokes, leads his color from the borders of the work to mass together in its center. Their surging energies meet and then fly apart again, leading the viewer's eye back outward in a movement that continues past the painting's outer borders. The sense of space in this circle becomes even stronger as we sense the three-dimensional space beyond, our eyes and imagination moving in a continual, rhythmic motion throughout and beyond this circle, in an echo of the philosophies underpinning Chinese culture.
The basic concepts of 21.10.66 developed out of another 1966 work, Zao's 1.4.66 (Fig. 3). That earlier work similarly presents a scene of expansive grandeur, but in 21.10.66, Zao has extracted its essentials, lifting out and focusing on an expanded view of one of its parts. The two works represent distinct aspects of what is an essentially unified aesthetic in Chinese art. The Chinese mode of appreciating landscape is, in one respect, found in the tradition of expansive, all-inclusive views of vast mountains and rivers, a tradition that extends all the way from the Five Dynasties and Northern Song painters, such as Jing Hao and Guan Tong, to Zao Wou-ki's 1.4.66. But this is not to say that, in another respect, the Chinese don't also appreciate close-up views and finely detailed scenes, and also consider these to be satisfying depictions of self-contained and complete worlds. Paintings of this type originated in the Tang and Song periods, reaching a peak of development in painters such as Ma Yuan of the Southern Song. These painters believed that the imposing energies and the infinite time span of the cosmos around them could equally be conveyed by a glimpse of water, the curve of a single boulder, and the briefness of one moment in time. Buddhists say that a mustard seed can be transformed into Mt. Sumeru, and that Mt. Sumera and its vast peaks can fit within a mustard seed-the seed can be transformed into a limitless universe. In the "Collection of Tang Prose," we find the saying, "All the lakes and rivers are only a little water, and earth and sky are full with just one bird." Likewise, the phrase "the world in a pot" in Chinese garden landscaping reflects the same notions about space-a bubble becomes a great sea, a rock garden, rows of mountain peaks, and a small pavilion, the broad sky above. Some people called their garden scenes their "little Cang Lang River" or "little Peng Lai Mountain." Thus, the smaller scene in 21.10.66 stands for the Chinese aesthetic of encapsulating a grand vista within the more intimate and approachable scale of everyday life, of projecting through miniature scenes a feeling of grand vistas. This is one of the highest aims of Chinese art-to convey the feeling of vast and endless depths of space within the limited frame of a painting, to depict the freedom and vastness of nature. In this, its approach is fundamentally different from the fixed-point perspective of Western painters and their presentation of space by systematically reducing it to the scale of the canvas.
21.10.66 also shows how Zao Wou-ki developed his use of pigments, brushwork, and texturing into a uniquely personal style of expression. Oils here take on the character of inks-their visual effects reflecting not just the thickness of oils, but also the huge variety of layering effects achieved through the heaviness or lightness of ink, its wetness or dryness, and its spreading, flowing effects. The oils here have a lively energy and their changing hues create a sense of transparency. Light seems to be shining through the pigments and subtly altering their character, from dark and heavy to transparent and soaring, electrifying the canvas with the feeling of an ever-expanding imaginative space. Zao transforms oil pigments from dense, inert masses into swathes of rhythmic movement and harmony with the mist atmosphere of Chinese ink-wash paintings. But the character of oils can also convey very vividly the flow of light and its energy, along with strong visual penetration and spatial layering effects. These are also central to Zao's creative achievements during this period, and they help convey the light and shadow that is sometimes missing from traditional Chinese landscapes. Thus Zao merged the ink and oil mediums to create a new development in the history of Chinese landscape art and lyrical ink-wash painting.
In 1948, Zao Wou-ki left his native China for Paris, France, to expand his artistic horizons. Roaming through the Louvre and art galleries large and small, he viewed all the great Western classics, while turning over in his mind the question of how to achieve a style with a modern feel. After about a year and a half, the creative urge to produce works in oil began to stir again, and during the 1951-52 period he traveled widely in Spain, Italy, and Switzerland, noting that "studying city architecture helps me think about the way I arrange space in my paintings." Zao's 1951 Untitled (Lot 1102), depicting a Venice cathedral, derives from the first batch of works he produced in response to these travels. This Untitled has been preserved in the collection of the noted Swiss collector Nesto Jacometti for nearly 60 years, and its first appearance on the market here tells us much about the artist's early creative explorations and achievements.
Like much of Zao's work from this period, Untitled has a strong narrative feel: a traveler, returning in the still of the night, stops by the riverside, and gazes with a hint of sadness at the sleeping city across the river, separated from him by the pale reflection of the cathedral cast over the water. The domed roof of the Paris cathedral forms the center of the work, with a horizon line running horizontally beneath, while below that the cathedral's reflection appears in textured strokes, with the solitary standing figure on the far left. With his simply sketched-out lines and placement of forms, Zao deftly creates interconnected, layered spaces in the foreground, middle ground, and background, his work at this stage still tending toward a Western style of spatial presentation. Layering and variation in the density of a single tone has been one of Zao's most often used expressive effects; here, the inky black layers of the foreground contrast with the pale tones far in the background. Their dark and light shadings, and the resulting combinations of form and empty space, express the distance and layering that govern the creative expression of the painting's space. Zao's pigments were thinned with a fair amount of turpentine to create the light, soft, smooth tones from which he derives his subtly varied layering. His pigments are applied with light grace in some areas and thickly and densely in others, a feature that often exemplifies his early work. There is a strong sense of light and penetration in the upper part of the canvas, along with a feeling of misty haze, like the auras of color that spread across ink-wash paintings. Pale moonlight seems to play across the sky, adding a poetic cast to the pleasingly spare and open spaces of the scene. But there is also plenty of attention to detail, and touches of subtlety abound: areas of pigment have been scraped out with the wooden handle of the brush, creating fine outlines around objects and projecting a feel similar to rubbings taken from the stone steles of China. During this time Zao was in fact indulging in lithography and the study of calligraphic symbols from ancient stone tablets and manuscripts. His line sketching in Untitled transforms calligraphic lines into symbolic motifs that highlight even further the independent beauty of the lines themselves. Even while noting certain general similarities with scenic compositions by Paul Klee, much of what we see in Zao Wou-ki's Untitled is solely his own, such as the dissolving haloes of color, the lines reminiscent of stone stele rubbings, and the sense of narrative and poetic atmosphere that inform the entire painting. These aspects of the work reflect traditional Chinese forms of art and Zao's pursuit of lithography during this period. But one of the most striking hallmarks of Zao's creative work during this period was his ability to imbue a canvas with such deep poetic imagination, even in a composition with such spareness and restraint as this Untitled, an ability that represents a unique achievement for this artist.
The composition of a slightly later work, 22.4.69 (Lot 1103), follows the trend, often seen in Zao's work around this time, toward dividing the canvas into three lateral segments. The beautiful blending of new color tones takes place mostly in the center of the canvas, leaving more sparsely colored areas of "empty space" above and below, in a white-black-white segmentation of space. This resembles the techniques of Chinese painter Ni Zan, whose landscapes often showed a near and far shore separated by a river running between, in compositions with mountain peaks in the far distance and the implied suggestion of a river above the foreground. Zao here chooses a pure, simple palette of mostly grey, black, and white, colors with a deep, quiet reserve. The simplicity and hidden expressive potential of his palette echoes the traditional Chinese view of "the five different colors found in black ink." As in Chinese ink-wash paintings, Zao's hazy, diffuse grey-whites suggest a landscape with rolling clouds or mists floating in the mountains; the pigments move with a light flow that follows the composed flow of Zao's brushwork across the canvas, evoking billowing waves and the subtle play of light across them. All in all, 22.4.69 suggests the same concern as in traditional Chinese paintings, the desire to capture the essence of their subject in compositions with an open, spare, and pure style (Fig. 4). The oils gather more densely in the center of Zao's composition, where he overlays their textures with a variety of lines that add strong energy or lead the viewer's eye along meandering paths. These lines once again suggest the dots or the falling or twisting strokes of Chinese calligraphy, but always with the appealing sense of beauty and graceful motion unique to this artist. The overlapping of the lines, or the way they break, combine, and leap, drives the shifts in the surrounding colors, lightening or intensifying their tones to give the entire canvas a lightness and energy, full of change and movement. Because line is also an element that can build and shape imaginative space, it combines with the overlapping buildup of colors to emphasize the complex suggestion of spatial dimensions. The work evokes the sharp peaks of landscape paintings on the one hand, or the ripples stirred by a gentle breeze over water, or the deep rolling mists above the sea; at the same time, purely aesthetic terms, it has a purity and sparseness, a meditative quality, that suggest Taoist realms of thought.
29.8.72 (Lot 1104) also takes the cosmos, space, and moving energy as its themes, though clearly with stylistic innovations that take the artist in a new direction. One aspect of this is its color and brushwork, which here even more resemble an ink-wash style. The colors here are lighter and more delicately tinted. Large amounts of turpentine were mixed into the pigments, which were spread and splashed onto the canvas in imitation of inks, leading us into a world wrapped in cloud and dense mist. In another area, this work also shows Zao's unique presentation of space during this period, as we gaze in a downward from a perspective located at some point in the sky itself (Fig. 6). In this respect, Zao continues exploring different depictions of natural scenes. The themes of his work have moved from his early, poetic cityscapes to the later use of abstraction and linear motifs to convey a hidden harmony of movement and change. Aside from the changing themes of his work, Zao also presented different viewpoints and ways of handling space. In 29.8.72, the presentation employed differs from both the cavalier perspective of traditional Chinese landscapes and the fixed-point perspective of the West, in a completely new approach to spatial presentation. In another complete shift in composition, the brilliant use of color in rocky, craggy textures now fades to the sides of the painting, while the center is taken up with large areas of light and pure colors that express deep space. This empty space is again reminiscent of the manner of composition in certain works by the Southern Song painter Ma Yuan (Fig. 7). The intermingling of white and green shades in the center evokes a scene of rolling mists, and the glowing, refracted light that emerges and shines from the painting's center demonstrates Zao's ever-greater command of light and shadow. 29.8.72 transports the viewer back to the primordial chaos of the universe, where we feel the surging energies and the chaotic potentials of light and life beginning to emerge from this grandeur. 29.8.72 demonstrates how the artist, from the '70s on, moved even further away from "figuration," "likenesses," and "imitation of nature," and instead, produced deeper and more abstract expressions of the hidden space, energy, life, and harmony in any landscape scene.

7.10.70 ( Lot 1105) softens the edge of Zao' s more robust calligraphic lines, letting its brushwork unfold with a controlled and elegant flair that brings subtle changes to a color palette that is basically similar to the above work. A comment that Zao made much later, during a 1985 lecture at the Hangzhou Academy of Arts, explains much about his feeling for the play of light and shadow within a single color tonality and his pursuit of multilayered effects. As he was explaining his use of color to the students, he noted, "The red color here, in this area on the model's back, is not uniformly red at each point, because of the way the skin of the human body changes. Some places need to be made deeper and softer, and some need to be made more active, because space is always in motion. You have to study the contrasts carefully. Don't be afraid to use pure color, to boldly expand the reach and the scope of your color application." In 7.10.70, Zao faithfully observes his own suggestions about color, employing light greens and blues that are quiet, reserved, and pure, but which are definitely not single uniform tones: extra touches of green, blue, white, and grey are mixed into the other colors, creating subtle alterations in hues within a closely linked tonal palette. Like a piece of silk velvet whose folds are shimmering in the sun, these colors produce a sense of floating, undulating movement. In some areas, they burst out with striking richness, then blend with a kind of coloristic rhythm into other areas where they are light, clear, and soft. These shadings add dimensionality by creating sensory impressions of depth and distance. They suggest the gradual passing of time and the change of seasons in the natural world, and further enrich Zao Wou-ki's repertoire of effects for conveying landscape-derived impressions in an abstract mode.