Ten years after Zao Wou-ki's death, China is – finally – paying a fitting tribute to the most French of its painters. No fewer than 200 works, including 129 oil paintings, are on display until February 2024 at the Chinese Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, the wealthy capital of Zhejiang, where Zao studied and taught, and which is now a national academy. This Chinese exhibition is infinitely richer than the 40 or so works hung at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2018.
It's also more educational. The academy devoted an entire floor to recounting (in Chinese and English) the life of this banker's son, born in 1920 into an old-fashioned, well-to-do family, who began studying painting in 1935 before moving –for what should have been two years – to France in 1948, where he remained until his death in 2013. This introduction, supplemented by several videos (including his interview on the TV show "Apostrophes" in 1988), is uncommonly honest. The many visitors will discover that Zao was almost expelled from the academy, not only because he refused to accept its discipline, but also because, as someone who swore only by Western art, he had turned in a single sheet of paper with an ink stain during his Chinese art exam, which earned him an F that should have been a failing grade.
Without the support of some of his teachers, who knew he was talented, the young rebel would have been expelled. After becoming a teacher, it was not only his peers but also the French embassy in China that encouraged him to go to Paris. His paintings had even preceded him there: In 1946, through the intermediary of the embassy's cultural advisor, the Musée Cernuschi in Paris exhibited some 200 of the young teacher's paintings as part of an exhibition on contemporary Chinese art.
As soon as he arrived in Paris on April 1, 1948, after 36 days of travel, Zao rushed to the Louvre, eager to discover the paintings he only knew through reproductions. Zao became a French citizen in 1964 thanks to the support of novelist and cultural affairs minister André Malraux and made numerous trips to Asia. The Japanese, Taiwanese and Hong Kongers all appreciated the quality of his paintings much before Communist China did. In 1985, when the Hangzhou Academy invited Zao to teach there for a month, the master felt that his pupils did not really understand him. Painting using only one's "inner self" was too far removed from what they had been taught. It was only in 1998-1999, when a first retrospective of his work toured several Chinese cities, that Zao felt the Chinese finally accepted his abstract painting.
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