Zao Wou-Ki

Chinese French painter (1920–2013)

Zao Wou Ki (; 1 February 1920 – 9 April 2013 Zao Wou Ki graduated from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he studied under Fang Ganmin and Wu Dayu.

Zao was born in Beijing with family roots in Dantu, Zhenjiang, Jiangsu province. In his childhood he was brought back to his hometown Dantu where he studied calligraphy and gained acceptance to the Hangzhou School of Fine Arts. He left the U. S. after a six week stay, traveling to Tokyo and then to Hong Kong, where he met his second wife Chan May Kan (陈美琴, May Zao), a film actress who had two children from her first marriage. Under the influence of Zao, she became a successful sculptor. In 1972, she committed suicide at age 41 due to mental illness. In 1972, he also visited his family in China who he had not seen since 1948. In 1997, he married his third wife Françoise Marquet, who now serves as president of the Zao Wou Ki Foundation.

Zao's works, influenced by Paul Klee, are orientated to abstraction. He names them with the date in which he finishes them, and in them, masses of colours appear to materialise a creating world, like a Big Bang, where light structures the canvas. He worked formats in triptychs and diptychs. While his work was stylistically similar to the Abstract Expressionists whom he met while travelling in New York, he was influenced by Impressionism. Zao Wou Ki stated that he had been influenced by the works of Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne. His meetings with Henri Michaux pushed him to review his Indian ink techniques, always based in Chinese traditional drawings. Zao was a member of the Académie des beaux arts, and was considered to have been one of the most successful Chinese painters during his lifetime. In 1982, he was invited to paint for the Fragrant Hills Hotel in Beijing, designed by I. M. Pei. I. M. Pei had a fellowship to Europe in the early 1950s and he met Wou Ki at Galerie Claude Bernard, the gallery that represented Wou Ki. In 1983, he returned to his alma mater, the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou to give lectures. Former French President Jacques Chirac was offered a painting by Zao Wou Ki by his ministers during their last meeting. By the end of his life Zao had stopped producing new paintings due to health problems. He died on 9 April 2013 at his home in Switzerland.

In 2018 the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, held an exhibition of around 40 works by Zao. From September 2023 to February 2024, the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou held an exhibition of almost 200 works of their alumni and former teacher Zao. The record for the artist was previously held by 29.09.64, another large painting that was sold for HK$153m (US$19.6m) at Christie's Hong Kong in May 2017. In 2018 Juin Octobre 1985, the largest size that Zao Wou ki ever worked on, was sold for HK$510m after premium, setting the record for the most valuable painting sold in Hong Kong auctions, as well as the auction record for an oil painting by an Asian artist.

Literary anthropologist Andrew Brandel's book Moving Worlds: Literature, Memory, and Migration in Berlin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023) uses Zao's 1957 painting Water Music as its cover image. The book cover is designed by Val Cooke.