Zao Wou-Ki

$6,000,000

Oil on canvas
31 11/16 x 45 11/16 inches (80.5 x 116 cm)
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I want to make the canvas come alive through contrast and the action of multiple layers of similar colors. I want to find a center for the radiation of light.

—Zao Wou-Ki

The present work, 5.11.62, was originally acquired from Laing Galleries in Toronto, an institution headed by G. Blair Laing that was central to defining post-war art in Canada. Laing exhibited Zao Wou-Ki’s work alongside paintings by Paul-Émile Borduas and Jean-Paul Riopelle, Zao’s close friend for half a decade. Zao successfully integrated the space of Chinese and Western art, bringing together the potentials of the two great artistic traditions. In this way, He adeptly created an utterly singular body of work that stands alongside the masters of Abstract Expressionism.

Zao painted the dramatic, vividly colored 5.11.62 on a horizontal canvas, the most typical format he employed in the 1960s. Evoking a churning seascape, the abstraction is divided into three parallel sections. With rich modulations of color, its ochre top and bottom portions are in harmony with the resonant bronzes and reds that define the painting’s space. In its middle section, Zao deployed energetic brushstrokes of white, yellow, and deep green, creating a sense of light that emerges from the painting’s center. Black lines traverse the composition, shuttling across the support to convey a tumultuous, powerful expression. “Zao Wou-Ki’s paintings are ageless in their questioning of the universe,” declared art critic François Jacob. “They present for us the birth of light, the origins of water, and beyond these turbulent upheavals of matter, a distant sense of the life energy coming into being in their midst.”