M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District, is pleased to announce a significant donation of works by Chinese-French master Zao Wou-Ki (1920–2013). The works were generously donated by Zao Wou-Ki’s daughter Sin-May Roy Zao, whose mother was Zao’s second wife, Hong Kong actress May Zao (1930–1972). The donation comprises twelve works, including nine prints, two oil paintings, and one watercolour painting ranging in dates from 1945 to 2005, spanning almost his entire professional career. This is M+’s first acquisition of Zao’s work and the biggest donation of his work ever to an Asian museum. M+ now holds one of the largest collections of his work in a public institution outside of Europe.

Among the most important modern masters, Zao was a fixture in the mid- and late twentieth-century international art world. He has been hailed as a lodestar for generations of Chinese artists and a trailblazer who achieved success in Paris by integrating his Chinese aesthetic heritage with European artistic mediums.

The donation comprises artworks spanning Zao Wou-Ki’s career

Zao is best known for majestic abstract oil paintings that are dramatic in colour and light. His prints and watercolours show a subtler, more delicate side, but are no less lyrical and bold in terms of colour, technique, and composition. The prints and the watercolour in this donation exemplify the confluence of gestural abstraction, elegant linearity, and material sensibility also evident in the two oil paintings, which capture the artist’s early exploration of abstraction. Together, the works provide an intimate portrayal of the impressive trajectory of a twentieth-century master.

Printmaking was a constant in Zao’s career. He immersed himself in lithography and etching soon after his arrival in Paris from China in 1948, and it was with a portfolio of prints that he first made his name in the French art world two years later. The process-oriented medium, to which he regularly returned for the rest of his career, allowed him to experiment freely with lines, colours, compositions, saturation, and traditional Chinese painting aesthetics. While Zao’s prints are often seen as testing sites for his oil paintings, the donated works demonstrate their brilliance as works of art in their own right.

Rural Idyll (1950) features the pastoral landscape elements and the child-like compositions that appear in the oil paintings Zao produced in China. Untitled (1957) contains marks derived from oracle bone scripts that defined his abstract paintings in his first decade abroad. His calligraphic instincts are evident in Untitled (etching with aquatint), 1960. A concentration of criss-crossing black horizontal strokes varying in thickness and density populates the middle section of the work, a recurring composition in his paintings and prints. The four prints produced in 1968 and 1969 include lithographs and etchings with aquatint, which encompass layered colours and compositions. These prints represent the fully abstract mode that defined Zao’s mid-career output. The two lithographs from 1989 and 2000 are even bolder, with eight and ten colours respectively, demonstrating the artist’s confidence with managing the complexity of the medium.

The two oil paintings reflect Zao’s artistic evolution in his early career, before he fully adopted abstraction. Open Air Theatre (1945) was made when Zao was still in China and already known for his avant-garde experimentations; Piazza Siena (1951) documents a stop in the Italian city on Zao’s European Grand Tour between 1950 and 1952. The work, which shows a remarkable transition from figuration to abstraction, depicts architecture reduced to lines and shapes while still retaining a vanishing point and two figures in the foreground. Not only do these rare oil paintings distinguish M+ from other Asian museum collections that focused more on his later abstract styles, they also have a special history with Hong Kong: both were exhibited in the artist’s 1996 retrospective at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Untitled; Biarritz (2005) is a watercolour painting made in the coastal resort town in southwestern France where Zao often stayed. Painted in the last decade of the artist’s life, it is clearly an impression of the shimmers and reflections of water. One sees the ease and confidence he channels through the many twists, turns, and directions of the liberal brushwork, and his habit of bringing nature into his picture.

As a whole, the group of works presents an extraordinary trajectory of this Chinese-French artist. It shows Zao’s mastery of the international visual language of abstraction, aided by a strong knowledge of and skills in Chinese painting.

The donor of the works, Sin-May Roy Zao, was very close to her parents, May Zao and Zao Wou-Ki. Hong Kong is her mother’s hometown and where her parents met, so it always represented an essential and inspirational place for them. Because of that, she said, ‘it was obvious that my father’s work had to return to the city. In particular, he gifted Piazza Siena (1951) to my mother shortly after they met, so it is even more fitting for the painting to come to M+.’

Suhanya Raffel, Museum Director, M+, underscores the importance of the donation to Hong Kong: ‘M+ is honoured to receive Sin-May Roy Zao’s generous donation of works by Zao Wou-Ki. The artist’s connection to Hong Kong can be traced back to the late 1950s—his visit to New Asia College (today part of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) brought him in contact with local artists and institutions, marking the beginning of a solid connection between him and Hong Kong. As a global museum of contemporary visual culture in Hong Kong, the donation allows us to enrich a narrative close to the heart of the city.’

Doryun Chong, Deputy Director, Curatorial and Chief Curator, M+, highlights Zao’s significance as an overseas Chinese artist: ‘Zao Wou-Ki is undoubtedly one of the few overseas Chinese artists who have transcended cultural boundaries and have been truly recognised in multiple contexts and narratives. Works by overseas Chinese artists serve as prime examples for the transnational condition of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—and the resulting visual culture—and as compelling arguments for a global outlook of the M+ Collections. The donation has strengthened M+’s ink art holdings, the first of its kind in contemporary institutions, showcase a unique local and regional cultural heritage that has strong global connections.’

Dr Lesley Ma, Curator, Ink Art, M+, further discusses the significance of the group of donated works: ‘Around the world, Zao Wou-Ki was and continues to be admired for the energy, colour, and poetry in his lyrical abstraction. More profoundly, his paintings and prints, as demonstrated by this group of works, convey a very specific atmosphere, light, and sentiment that together conjure the Chinese concept of yijing—a total integration of internal and external worlds—the most abstract but important element in Chinese aesthetics and visuality. This powerful aesthetic connection of Zao’s works to Chinese painting tradition reinforces M+’s curatorial framework for ink art that pushes beyond the heritage expressions of ink.’

Visitors can view three of Zao’s prints featured in the exhibition Individuals, Networks, Expressions in the South Galleries at M+ after the museum reopens.

Remarks

About Zao Wou-Ki
Zao Wou-Ki was born in Peking (Beijing) in 1920 and raised in Nantong. Immersed in Chinese painting and calligraphy in his youth, he graduated from the Hangzhou Academy of Art (today’s China Academy of Fine Art), where he learned from Lin Fengmian, Wu Dayu, and other progressive artists who studied in Europe in the 1920s. In 1948, Zao left China for Paris, his home for the rest of his life and where he enjoyed an extraordinary career. In 1951, works by Paul Klee became an influential factor that pushed Zao toward abstraction with a strong emotional content. He fully adopted abstraction in 1954 and developed his signature gestural, lyrical, and forceful style. He quickly became a member of the French cultural elite, collected by French museums and represented by prestigious galleries. In the early 1970s, he returned to using Chinese ink for the first time since he arrived in France, and later developed an important parallel path with his oil paintings and prints. Towards the end of his career, figuration returned subtly to his compositions and reached remarkable harmony with abstraction.

In 1957, Zao traveled to the United States for the first time, where he befriended the New York School Abstract Expressionist painters and was inspired by their style. The same trip took him to Japan and Hong Kong, where he would leave lasting impressions on the respective art worlds. In 1985, a historic visit to the China Academy of Fine Art, his alma mater, electrified and nurtured students who were eager to absorb Zao’s knowledge on contemporary art outside of China and learn first-hand his ideas of modernist abstraction with Chinese characteristics. Zao had numerous solo exhibitions during his lifetime as well as posthumously. The Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris held his first one-man exhibition in 1981 and 1982, which toured to Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In 1983, the National Museum of History in Taipei organised his first solo exhibition there. Another tour in 1996 traveled from the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts to the Hong Kong Museum of Art. In recent years, the Asia Society Museum in New York (2016), the Asia University Museum of Modern Art in Taichung (2017) and the Musée d’art Modern de la Ville de Paris (2018) have organised large scale retrospective exhibitions and brought a new generation of audience to his work. Zao’s work is widely collected by museums around the world. In 1984, he was made an Officier de l’Ordre de la Legion d’Honneur and elected to the French Academy of Fine Arts in 2002. In 1994, he was awarded the Premium Imperial Award of Painting by the Japanese Emperor. He died in Switzerland in 2013.

About M+
M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Located in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, M+ is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. Our aim is to be a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century.

About the West Kowloon Cultural District
The West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest and most ambitious cultural projects in the world. Its vision is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong on forty hectares of reclaimed land located alongside Victoria Harbour. With a varied mix of theatres, performance spaces, and museums, the West Kowloon Cultural District will produce and host world-class exhibitions, performances, and cultural events, providing twenty-three hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometre waterfront promenade.