Exhibition illustrates boundless fusion of painting and poetry
Print Edition
If I had not become a painter, I would have been a poet,” the late Chinese-French artist Zao Wou-Ki once said.
Zao was one of the most famous contemporary abstract oil painters both in China and France.
“Echoes of Verses: The Poetic Palimpsests of Zao Wou-Ki” is on show at Shanghai Jiushi Art Museum through October 13. The exhibition features the master’s prints in different periods, spanning from figurative to abstraction.
It is also one of a series of events to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the establishment of Sino-France diplomatic relations.
Selected from Zao’s prints from the 1950s to the early 2000s, the exhibition includes nearly 100 of his rare prints and ceramics, plus works and poems completed in collaborations between Zao and various poets.
It juxtaposes different stages of the master’s art renderings with corresponding poetry, reflecting a multidimensional enlightenment of intellect and spirit through the boundless fusion of art and literature.
The exhibition also displays selected translations of more than 60 illustrated poems.
Having grown up in a family with deep cultural traditions, Zao studied painting at the China Academy of Art during the 1930s and taught at the academy during the 1940s. In 1948, Zao went to Paris to further his studies because he loved French Impressionism.
In 1949, after traveling around the world, Zao returned to Paris, fusing Western abstract painting with the ethereal imagery of the Chinese method of freehand painting. He then stepped into stardom in the art world.
While deeply influenced by traditional Chinese poetry, Zao’s works on show also resonate with modern French poetry. Those images, like wordless verses, have constructed a world of colors, lines and patterns teeming with thoughts and sentiments.
Focused on the poetic implications of his paintings, the exhibition illustrates the correspondence between visual art and literature by delving deep into imagery and metaphor.
By reading texts by world-important literary figures such as Henri Michaux, René Char, Ezra Pound and André Malraux, viewers are able to reconceptualize the imagery and metaphors in Zao’s works.
“I have read poetry since my childhood,” Zao once said. “I feel these two forms of expression as being of the same nature, physically. They both express the breath of life, the trembling of the brush on the canvas, or the hand on the paper as the character takes shape.”
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