Zao Wou-Ki : Les Allées D'un Autre Monde

Exhibition at Les Franciscaines, Deauville, 2 March - 26 May 2024

Throughout his career, Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013) navigated between the tradition of his native country and Western modernity, eventually finding a new, liberated and free path.

Punctuated by quotations from Zao Wou-Ki and his translations of Laozi's Daodejing, the founding text of Taoism, this exhibition catalogue pays tribute to the artistic freedom of Zao Wou-Ki, a total artist whose existential approach was entirely dedicated to the representation of realities beyond those of the visible world.

The book invites us to embrace the incredible richness and diversity of the techniques through which the artist expressed his art in the quest for great harmony: paintings, watercolours, inks, prints, tapestries, porcelain, steles, books of poetry.

His works include an imposing mural, over sixteen metres long, commissioned by the French government for the L'Herminier secondary school in La Seyne-sur-Mer, and the majestic triptych Hommage à Claude Monet (1991), which symbolises the fusion of the culture of his native country, the teachings he received, the age-old traditions of European painting, the boldness of American painting, and the new paths he took, notably the transcendence of reality through abstraction.