Zao Wou-ki: Chinese painter who became a Western master
When abstract painter Zao Wou-ki, who died this week, left China in 1948, it was the beginning of a journey that would see him bridge East and West
Zao Wou-ki could date the day his painterly life began in Europe. It was April 1, 1948. He had arrived in France that morning, after a 10-week voyage from Shanghai via Hong Kong (he liked to say he was the only passenger who didn't succumb to seasickness) and by that afternoon he was at the Louvre, absorbing the light and colour of those European masters he'd only seen in postcards and magazines such as Life, Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.
Zao's path to artistic greatness was focused and, in pre-revolutionary China, privileged. He was the descendant of a Sung emperor and his grandfather, who bore the title xiucai that signified success in the rigorous Imperial examinations, taught the young Zao calligraphy for two hours every day.
His father was a banker and an amateur painter who had once won an artist's prize in Panama, and who encouraged his son's talent. While Zao's mother thought that he should go into banking, his father - remarking that any bank which employed his son was likely to go bankrupt - made sure he was enrolled as an art student at the Hangzhou School of Fine Arts by the time he was 15, and provided generous funds for travel.
Many years later, reviewing his life in an interview conducted in the three languages he spoke - Shanghainese, French and English - Zao would say of his father, "He made me what I am today. I am his creation."
When the elder Zao died in a Chinese hospital in 1968, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, he was a man disappointed in his country but not in his son.