Zao Wou-Ki
Left Shanghai for Paris in 1948 and made abstraction that reads as Chinese landscape and is not.
Zao Wou-Ki was born in Beijing in 1920 into a family that owned works by the Song and Ming masters, trained at the Hangzhou academy, and left for Paris in 1948 with his first wife, arriving at the Cite des Arts and settling for life. Klee sent him towards abstraction; a return visit to Asia and the death of his second wife May in 1972 sent him back to ink. The mature canvases — vast, atmospheric fields of colour, light and turbulence, titled only with the date they were finished — hold the space and breath of classical Chinese landscape without depicting anything. He died in Switzerland in 2013.
One of the largest markets in modern Asian art, set principally in Hong Kong, with the great canvases of the 1950s to 1970s at the top; works are usually identified by their date-title, so the exact completion date is the key. Zao is heavily forged and provenance is scrutinised closely. Ink works on paper from the 1970s onwards are a substantial and distinct body. There is a large printed output of lithographs and etchings, plentiful and modestly valued, which owners frequently mistake for paintings in reproduction.
If you own a work by Zao Wou-Ki
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