A few years after arriving in Paris, Zao Wou-Ki’s encounter with Henri Michaux—a poet who explored the realms of dreams and the unconscious—prompted him to return to the technique of Chinese ink and to develop abstract themes influenced by traditional Chinese painting.

Until the early 1950s, Zao Wou-Ki’s work retained allusions to reality, but from then on, any anecdotal or descriptive quality of the motifs disappeared from his works, giving way to light—sometimes softened by clouds or rain, sometimes dazzling with the colours of fireworks—within swirling structures resembling comet tails.

Among the various media used by Zao Wou-Ki throughout his career, watercolour holds a prominent place. This technique lends his compositions on paper an airy, light texture, revealing a highly poetic fluidity and transparency that draws its inspiration from Chinese aesthetics and creates an imaginary and mysterious world.

Poetry being one of the cornerstones of Zao Wou-Ki’s work – he who likes to quote the Tang dynasty master, Wang Wei (699–759): “a painting is a poem that has taken shape for the eye” – we might cite, by way of illustration, an extract from a poem by Henri Michaux, which he wrote for his friend in 1980, “Jeux d’encre”, and which captures the atmosphere of the artist’s works: “The abstract takes on a more abstract form through the detachment and purification of presences... The felt presence of the ancient aerial perspective…"

The 1962 Composition is on display at the Galerie La Hume in Paris to mark the unveiling of Zao Wou-Ki’s illustrations for Henri Malraux’s "La Tentation de l’Occident". Zao and Malraux were close: it was thanks to Malraux that the artist became a naturalised French citizen in 1964.