Zao Wou-Ki valuation
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 and settled there for life.
What a work by Zao Wou-Ki is worth
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Bio
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 and settled there 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.
Montparnasse, Michaux and Pierre Loeb
Zao studied at the Hangzhou academy from 1935 to 1941, where his teachers included Lin Fengmian. In April 1948 he and his first wife, the composer Xie Jinglan, took a studio on the rue du Moulin-Vert in Montparnasse, next door to Giacometti. He learned lithography at the Desjobert workshop, and Henri Michaux, who became a close friend, brought the dealer Pierre Loeb to his studio; Loeb showed him from 1950 to 1957.
He was a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and received the Praemium Imperiale. In 1982 he painted for I. M. Pei's Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris gave him an exhibition in 2018. His widow, Françoise Marquet, is president of the Zao Wou-Ki Foundation.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
