Watercolor, 1986

24.00 cm. x 32.00 cm. | 9.45 in. x 12.6 in. (paper)

53.50 cm. x 60.50 cm. | 21.06 in. x 23.82 in. (frame)

Watercolor and ink on paper

In this watercolor enhanced with Indian ink, Zao Wou-Ki achieves a pictorial plenitude where color, brilliant and diffuse, becomes breath and light. The yellow-orange radiates across the paper, not as a set hue, but as an energy that expands, pulsates and dilutes into a vibrant lime green. For him, color is a living material, traversed by transparencies and lights, sculpted by fullness and emptiness.
The eye seeks to recognize an earth, a sky, a forest, but comes up against the fluid abstraction of the brush. Touches of red resonate, while incisive black seems to inscribe a rhythm, a gestural punctuation reminiscent of calligraphy.
For a long time, Zao Wou-Ki refused to work with Indian ink, for fear of a too obvious return to the traditions of his academic training, of an ease that would have confined him to the label of “Chinese painter”. As the artist himself said: “Thanks to my training, this was what I knew best, and I wanted to avoid taking the easy way out. I wanted to avoid taking the easy way out. Yet in the 1980s, he
explored this calligraphic technique, not to recapture the past, but to reinvent it. Ink teaches him to think differently about composition, to explore the power of emptiness, to give color the freedom of breath. Here, calligraphy is an art of pure gesture: incisive, dazzling blacks punctuate space like essential punctuations, dynamic interruptions that redefine space.
In Taoist and Confucian thought, emptiness is associated with Qi, the vital breath that animates all things. In painting, leaving voids suggests this breath, giving an impression of movement and life. The artist's aim is not to show everything, but to evoke, to leave room for the viewer's imagination. It's this fluidity, this Qi that animates the work, this mastered speed of the brush that inscribes each trace in the moment. Watercolor and ink become a territory of experimentation between the Song tradition of literary art and the lyrical abstraction of the 20th century, between the intuition of gesture and the construction of a space where light circulates. An interior landscape, an image of a world in
suspension, this work tells nothing, yet everything is at play: density and lightness, shadow and radiance, matter and breath.

Certificate of authenticity
Excellent condition

Ref : LCD7162