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拍品专文
'[The forms] are revealed, yet half hidden; broken, yet connected. The lines move spontaneously to trace the pulse of reverie: this is what Zao Wou-Ki likes. At a glance, the canvas seems to dance with the joyful atmosphere characteristic of a Chinese countryside village. The atmosphere, amidst a jumble of symbols, is joyful yet funny and playful.' —Henri Michaux
Amidst chromatic density, the gaze is drawn by the lines, wandering between earth and sky. Through compact, densely packed lines that create a rhythmic sense of space, Cathédrale et ses environs, painted by Zao Wou-Ki in 1951, already demonstrates how, at an early stage of his career, he had begun to integrate space, memory, and time into his painting. Drawing on the foundations of landscape painting established during his studies at the Hangzhou National Academy of Art, the work reveals an itinerant mode of viewing intrinsic to the Chinese painting tradition — one in which the image is not constructed from a fixed perspective, but comes into being through movement and acts of looking back. For Zao, this voyage-inflected visual narration is both a return to lived experience of the homeland and a learning approach cultivated during his Hangzhou years, shaped by Lin Fengmian’s advocacy of East-West synthesis that placed the absorption and transformation of Western painting at its core. With Cathédrale et ses environs, Zao inaugurates an entirely new and dynamic pictorial language. Employing ink-like chromatic washes alongside lines reminiscent of cave murals or the incised markings of ancient Han dynasty bricks, the painting weaves the spatial logic of Chinese landscape painting into its compositional structure. During this grand tour, through first-hand encounters with cities, museums, and religious architecture, Zao reshaped his artistic vision. The sights and experiences gathered along the way — together with Western cathedral architecture — were further transformed into a visual language that carries the immediacy of a diary and yet is highly structured. In this process, memories of Hangzhou, experiences in Paris, and scenes from Italy intersect and surface across different temporal strata, unfolding a journey that moves from East to West. Cathédrale et ses environs stands as one of the largest works Zao Wou-Ki produced between 1950 and 1953. A work of comparable scale from the same period, now is held in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, likewise it features lines resembling incised markings—here, Zao juxtaposes elements so that forms appear to float, while layers of brushwork embed them firmly within the image itself, giving the work a complex and compelling visual effect.
In the early 1950s, Zao Wou-Ki acquired a small car and set out on a journey that would last several years, following the tradition of the ‘Grand Tour’ that had flourished among Europe’s upper classes in the 17th and 18th centuries. In European culture, the Grand Tour was more than travel; it was a cultural institution that combined artistic pilgrimage, historical inquiry, and spiritual cultivation, intended to guide the younger generation towards the formation of both selfhood and worldview through cultural immersion. For Zao, this journey likewise became a profound visual pilgrimage. Travelling through France, Switzerland, Italy, and the Netherlands, he encountered firsthand the natural and urban landscapes of each region, and repeatedly returning to museums and historical sites.
This intensive yet free-ranging journey placed Zao Wou-Ki in direct contact with Europe’s cultural centres, as he moved between nature, architecture, and masterworks of art, reshaping his understanding of space and visual meaning. Through direct engagement with Western art across historical periods — from the classical to the modern — he gradually grasped its spiritual transformations and internal continuities, arriving at a profound understanding of how the language and logic of Western art took shape through history. Through a process of reduction applied to diverse techniques and compositional approaches, he gradually forged symbols that reflect reality while exploring the interplay between abstraction and inner experience, laying the essential groundwork for the maturation of his later cross-cultural lyrical abstraction.
During this journey, Zao Wou-Ki created several works centred on church architecture, many inspired by his observations and experiences in Italy. Within the cultural resonance and spatial systems of such religious architecture, verticality, scale, and order converge to suggest a sublime structure suffused with sacredness — an element that became a key compositional reference for Zao Wou-Ki. In Cathédrale et ses environs, crisp, short lines are layered to outline the soaring, rhythmic contours of a Gothic-style cathedral. Spires and vertical lines ascend skywards, creating a spatial dimension that draws the eye towards the heavens. As the cathedral’s form echoes the crescent moon hanging aloft in the composition, space is pulled upwards and momentarily held there, allowing the sanctity of religious architecture to emerge within this quiet interval.
The upper portion of the composition depicts church scenery observed by the artist during his travels in Italy, while the lower portion shifts into everyday life along Chinese riverbanks, featuring human figures and animals. Using sparse and succinct lines, the artist captures the moment of a figure turning a bird upside down — a detail that recalls traditional Chinese practices of training birds for fishing. The birds surrounding the figure also have subtly curved beaks, resembling the physical traits of a waterfowl. In China, since ancient times, in regions rich in waterways such as Jiangnan and Guilin, it has been customary to train cormorants to assist in fishing. Fishermen would tie a cord around the birds’ necks to prevent them from swallowing their catch; when a cormorant captures a larger fish, it is gently tilted upside down to induce it to release the fish, completing this unique act of human-bird collaboration.
The harmony between humans and nature depicted in Cathédrale et ses environs embodies Zao Wou-Ki’s practice, established during his Hangzhou years, of transforming everyday moments into a flowing rhythm of line. It recalls the poetic spaces in Lin Fengmian’s paintings, composed of birds in flight, pedestrians, and riverbanks. Through restrained lines and blank space, Lin Fengmian created an artistic world that is both subtle and expansive. In Cathédrale et ses environs, Zao extends this approach into an even more abstract and fluid visual rhythm. The religious architecture in the upper portion and the waterside fishing scene below form a vertical juxtaposition, delineating distinct layers while suggesting the convergence of the sacred and the secular, of distant horizons and memory, within a unified sense of time and space.
Cathédrale et ses environs reveals the forward-looking, contemporary sensibility that characterises Zao Wou-Ki’s early works. The highly simplified human figures situate the painting between abstraction and narrative, evoking a primordial vitality. Employing coarse lines to capture everyday labour and the interactions of life, the painting carries a quality reminiscent of Art Brut. The concept of Art Brut championed by Jean Dubuffet, a friend of Zao’s, celebrates expression unmeditated by formal discipline, which arises from intuition and lived experience. The work also calls to mind the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, a neighbour to Zao, who radically stripped the human figure of mass and materiality, turning the line into a trace of existence and a mark of consciousness. In Cathédrale et ses environs, Zao Wou-Ki distils moments of everyday labour into concise yet forceful visual symbols, sustaining an untamed vitality between abstraction and narrative, and revealing his profound engagement with primal expressive energy.
The form of the small boat in the painting serves as a key visual clue for understanding how Zao Wou-Ki embeds memories of his homeland within a Western landscape. Above and to the right of the figures and birds, a flat, elongated Chinese skiff drifts beneath the Italian cathedral, like a phantom that follows the viewer’s steps, occupying a liminal, transitional space between the elevated European religious architecture above and the Jiangnan waterscape below. In its spatial construction, Cathédrale et ses environs employs the temporal viewing logic of Chinese landscape painting. The composition is organised into foreground, middle ground, and distance; the distant cathedral rises like a mountain mass, towering towards the sky and moon. In the middle ground, the water — brushed with pale, mist-like washes — evokes a haze in which memories of home intertwine with glimpses of Western architecture, creating areas of blank space through which time flows. In the context of 1950s Paris, this 'travelling viewpoint' represented a highly avant-garde approach to spatial composition. In Zao Wou-Ki’s work, time does not follow a linear narrative; rather, it flows continuously, shaped through the permeation of colour and the layering of line.
Upon his arrival in Paris in 1948, Zao Wou-Ki absorbed the creativity of Western masters through intense observation and study, yet he never abandoned his Eastern roots. Life experiences from Hangzhou and imagery of watery towns quietly seeped into his paintings, intertwining with Western architecture and landscapes, gradually giving rise to a visual language uniquely his own. The motif of the small boat would continue to resonate throughout his late works. In Zao Wou-Ki’s final large-scale oil painting, Le vent pousse la mer – Triptyque, a solitary boat drifts at the intersection of heaven and earth, navigating surging currents of air and light, as if passing through the mists of memory where Eastern and Western cultures converge.
Looking back, these subtle yet crucial visual cues in Cathédrale et ses environs weave together a softly discernible journey — beginning in the water towns of Jiangnan, passing through the modern vistas of Paris, and ultimately arriving at the religious spaces of Italy. All three unfold simultaneously within the composition, constructing a spiritual journey that traverses culture and geography. This East–West journey extends beyond pictorial elements, permeating the temporal structure of the painting itself.
In this light, lines wander between revelation and concealment, while colours breathe slowly through moments of pause. The image constantly takes shape, yet simultaneously retreats. The gaze, like a travelling companion, moves between memory and reality, East and West; within the pulsation of reverie, it gives rise to an inner universe that remains unfixed yet perpetually open. Looking back over the subsequent decades of Zao Wou-Ki’s artistic development, whether in the wild, cursive brushwork of the 1960s or the vast, atmospheric cosmic visions of the post-1970s period, his core language — a profound awareness of space, time, and the flow of life — appears to have been quietly foreshadowed in Cathédrale et ses environs.
Amidst chromatic density, the gaze is drawn by the lines, wandering between earth and sky. Through compact, densely packed lines that create a rhythmic sense of space, Cathédrale et ses environs, painted by Zao Wou-Ki in 1951, already demonstrates how, at an early stage of his career, he had begun to integrate space, memory, and time into his painting. Drawing on the foundations of landscape painting established during his studies at the Hangzhou National Academy of Art, the work reveals an itinerant mode of viewing intrinsic to the Chinese painting tradition — one in which the image is not constructed from a fixed perspective, but comes into being through movement and acts of looking back. For Zao, this voyage-inflected visual narration is both a return to lived experience of the homeland and a learning approach cultivated during his Hangzhou years, shaped by Lin Fengmian’s advocacy of East-West synthesis that placed the absorption and transformation of Western painting at its core. With Cathédrale et ses environs, Zao inaugurates an entirely new and dynamic pictorial language. Employing ink-like chromatic washes alongside lines reminiscent of cave murals or the incised markings of ancient Han dynasty bricks, the painting weaves the spatial logic of Chinese landscape painting into its compositional structure. During this grand tour, through first-hand encounters with cities, museums, and religious architecture, Zao reshaped his artistic vision. The sights and experiences gathered along the way — together with Western cathedral architecture — were further transformed into a visual language that carries the immediacy of a diary and yet is highly structured. In this process, memories of Hangzhou, experiences in Paris, and scenes from Italy intersect and surface across different temporal strata, unfolding a journey that moves from East to West. Cathédrale et ses environs stands as one of the largest works Zao Wou-Ki produced between 1950 and 1953. A work of comparable scale from the same period, now is held in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, likewise it features lines resembling incised markings—here, Zao juxtaposes elements so that forms appear to float, while layers of brushwork embed them firmly within the image itself, giving the work a complex and compelling visual effect.
In the early 1950s, Zao Wou-Ki acquired a small car and set out on a journey that would last several years, following the tradition of the ‘Grand Tour’ that had flourished among Europe’s upper classes in the 17th and 18th centuries. In European culture, the Grand Tour was more than travel; it was a cultural institution that combined artistic pilgrimage, historical inquiry, and spiritual cultivation, intended to guide the younger generation towards the formation of both selfhood and worldview through cultural immersion. For Zao, this journey likewise became a profound visual pilgrimage. Travelling through France, Switzerland, Italy, and the Netherlands, he encountered firsthand the natural and urban landscapes of each region, and repeatedly returning to museums and historical sites.
This intensive yet free-ranging journey placed Zao Wou-Ki in direct contact with Europe’s cultural centres, as he moved between nature, architecture, and masterworks of art, reshaping his understanding of space and visual meaning. Through direct engagement with Western art across historical periods — from the classical to the modern — he gradually grasped its spiritual transformations and internal continuities, arriving at a profound understanding of how the language and logic of Western art took shape through history. Through a process of reduction applied to diverse techniques and compositional approaches, he gradually forged symbols that reflect reality while exploring the interplay between abstraction and inner experience, laying the essential groundwork for the maturation of his later cross-cultural lyrical abstraction.
During this journey, Zao Wou-Ki created several works centred on church architecture, many inspired by his observations and experiences in Italy. Within the cultural resonance and spatial systems of such religious architecture, verticality, scale, and order converge to suggest a sublime structure suffused with sacredness — an element that became a key compositional reference for Zao Wou-Ki. In Cathédrale et ses environs, crisp, short lines are layered to outline the soaring, rhythmic contours of a Gothic-style cathedral. Spires and vertical lines ascend skywards, creating a spatial dimension that draws the eye towards the heavens. As the cathedral’s form echoes the crescent moon hanging aloft in the composition, space is pulled upwards and momentarily held there, allowing the sanctity of religious architecture to emerge within this quiet interval.
The upper portion of the composition depicts church scenery observed by the artist during his travels in Italy, while the lower portion shifts into everyday life along Chinese riverbanks, featuring human figures and animals. Using sparse and succinct lines, the artist captures the moment of a figure turning a bird upside down — a detail that recalls traditional Chinese practices of training birds for fishing. The birds surrounding the figure also have subtly curved beaks, resembling the physical traits of a waterfowl. In China, since ancient times, in regions rich in waterways such as Jiangnan and Guilin, it has been customary to train cormorants to assist in fishing. Fishermen would tie a cord around the birds’ necks to prevent them from swallowing their catch; when a cormorant captures a larger fish, it is gently tilted upside down to induce it to release the fish, completing this unique act of human-bird collaboration.
The harmony between humans and nature depicted in Cathédrale et ses environs embodies Zao Wou-Ki’s practice, established during his Hangzhou years, of transforming everyday moments into a flowing rhythm of line. It recalls the poetic spaces in Lin Fengmian’s paintings, composed of birds in flight, pedestrians, and riverbanks. Through restrained lines and blank space, Lin Fengmian created an artistic world that is both subtle and expansive. In Cathédrale et ses environs, Zao extends this approach into an even more abstract and fluid visual rhythm. The religious architecture in the upper portion and the waterside fishing scene below form a vertical juxtaposition, delineating distinct layers while suggesting the convergence of the sacred and the secular, of distant horizons and memory, within a unified sense of time and space.
Cathédrale et ses environs reveals the forward-looking, contemporary sensibility that characterises Zao Wou-Ki’s early works. The highly simplified human figures situate the painting between abstraction and narrative, evoking a primordial vitality. Employing coarse lines to capture everyday labour and the interactions of life, the painting carries a quality reminiscent of Art Brut. The concept of Art Brut championed by Jean Dubuffet, a friend of Zao’s, celebrates expression unmeditated by formal discipline, which arises from intuition and lived experience. The work also calls to mind the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, a neighbour to Zao, who radically stripped the human figure of mass and materiality, turning the line into a trace of existence and a mark of consciousness. In Cathédrale et ses environs, Zao Wou-Ki distils moments of everyday labour into concise yet forceful visual symbols, sustaining an untamed vitality between abstraction and narrative, and revealing his profound engagement with primal expressive energy.
The form of the small boat in the painting serves as a key visual clue for understanding how Zao Wou-Ki embeds memories of his homeland within a Western landscape. Above and to the right of the figures and birds, a flat, elongated Chinese skiff drifts beneath the Italian cathedral, like a phantom that follows the viewer’s steps, occupying a liminal, transitional space between the elevated European religious architecture above and the Jiangnan waterscape below. In its spatial construction, Cathédrale et ses environs employs the temporal viewing logic of Chinese landscape painting. The composition is organised into foreground, middle ground, and distance; the distant cathedral rises like a mountain mass, towering towards the sky and moon. In the middle ground, the water — brushed with pale, mist-like washes — evokes a haze in which memories of home intertwine with glimpses of Western architecture, creating areas of blank space through which time flows. In the context of 1950s Paris, this 'travelling viewpoint' represented a highly avant-garde approach to spatial composition. In Zao Wou-Ki’s work, time does not follow a linear narrative; rather, it flows continuously, shaped through the permeation of colour and the layering of line.
Upon his arrival in Paris in 1948, Zao Wou-Ki absorbed the creativity of Western masters through intense observation and study, yet he never abandoned his Eastern roots. Life experiences from Hangzhou and imagery of watery towns quietly seeped into his paintings, intertwining with Western architecture and landscapes, gradually giving rise to a visual language uniquely his own. The motif of the small boat would continue to resonate throughout his late works. In Zao Wou-Ki’s final large-scale oil painting, Le vent pousse la mer – Triptyque, a solitary boat drifts at the intersection of heaven and earth, navigating surging currents of air and light, as if passing through the mists of memory where Eastern and Western cultures converge.
Looking back, these subtle yet crucial visual cues in Cathédrale et ses environs weave together a softly discernible journey — beginning in the water towns of Jiangnan, passing through the modern vistas of Paris, and ultimately arriving at the religious spaces of Italy. All three unfold simultaneously within the composition, constructing a spiritual journey that traverses culture and geography. This East–West journey extends beyond pictorial elements, permeating the temporal structure of the painting itself.
In this light, lines wander between revelation and concealment, while colours breathe slowly through moments of pause. The image constantly takes shape, yet simultaneously retreats. The gaze, like a travelling companion, moves between memory and reality, East and West; within the pulsation of reverie, it gives rise to an inner universe that remains unfixed yet perpetually open. Looking back over the subsequent decades of Zao Wou-Ki’s artistic development, whether in the wild, cursive brushwork of the 1960s or the vast, atmospheric cosmic visions of the post-1970s period, his core language — a profound awareness of space, time, and the flow of life — appears to have been quietly foreshadowed in Cathédrale et ses environs.