Wou-ki ZAO

Biography

Zao Wou-Ki was born on February 13, 1921, in Beijing, into a very old family whose origins date back to the Song Dynasty (10th–13th century). Two paintings by Zhao Mengfu and Mi Fu, preserved within the family collection, were displayed each year to celebrate the ancestors’ anniversaries. Throughout his life, Zao Wou-Ki regarded these masters among the greatest painters in Chinese art.

Raised in a cultivated environment deeply sensitive to the arts, he was introduced to calligraphy at an early age before entering the School of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, where he studied both Chinese and Western painting. He later taught there from 1941 to 1947. His training developed at the crossroads of two major traditions: the Chinese pictorial heritage, particularly that of the Song Dynasty, and European academic teaching. This dual culture shaped a singular artistic language combining calligraphy, drawing from life, oil painting, and the mastery of linear and atmospheric perspective.

At the age of twenty-seven, he left China for France and settled in Paris, in the Montparnasse district. There, he attended the classes of Émile Othon Friesz and discovered the postwar Parisian art scene.

From the 1950s onward, he developed a highly personal pictorial universe that gradually evolved toward a lyrical and atmospheric abstraction, in which light, breath, and space became the true subjects of painting. Throughout his career, he explored a variety of techniques, alternating between oil painting, printmaking, calligraphy, and later, Chinese ink painting.

Naturalized as a French citizen in 1964 with the support of André Malraux, he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2002.

He passed away on April 9, 2013, in Nyon and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.