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拍品专文
'It is on this very point of space creation that he (Zao Wou-Ki) demonstrates his closest connection with China. He carves out a small piece of land from the universe, yet it embraces the entire universe; he frames it, yet the frame does not confine it.' – Georges Duby on Zao Wou-Ki
Against a magnificent field of layered blue washes, brownish-gold brushstrokes and oracle bone script-like symbols gather, dissolve, and flare outward from the canvas’s turbulent center, like a nebula in flux, radiantly expanding and receding across the sky. Created in 1956, Voie Lactée - 09.11.56 (Milky Way - 09.11.56) is the only known work by Zao Wou-Ki inspired by the Milky Way. Completed during Zao’s highly-acclaimed ‘oracle bone’ period (c. 1954–1958), this work reflects the distinctive style he developed at the time. Oracle bone script, the earliest known writing system from East Asia, originated during the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BCE). Used to record divinations, it served as a means of communicating with the heavens and seek guidance about the future. These divinations addressed a wide range of concerns, including agricultural affairs, celestial phenomena such as abundant harvest, rainfall, and solar and lunar eclipses, as well as ancestral worship and sacrificial offerings. Most of the surviving records were produced by the royal court under the direction of the Shang kings are known as ‘royal divination inscriptions.’ These inscriptions also addressed dreams, childbirths, marriages, hunting, travels, and affairs of the royal court. Carefully preserved as part of the royal annals in underground chambers after each divination, these oracle bone scripts have survived to the present day and become vital resources for historical research. In Voie Lactée, Zao transforms the pictographic symbols and world of this ancient civilization into abstract forms, creating a visual language that transcends time and reaches across the infinite universe. Through the work’s mysterious poetic radiance, Zao evokes the boundless imagination of the cosmos and the unknown worlds beyond it.
Zao’s works from his ‘oracle bone’ period were predominantly of small to medium sizes. Only 23 extant works from the period are of a size comparable to or larger than Voie Lactée, rendering it a masterpiece of museum collection calibre. This work has been exhibited at major institutions across Europe and Asia, including the Folkwang Museum, Essen, the Fukuoka Art Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art in Japan; and the Musée Ingres Bourdellein in Montauban. It was also featured in the major 2023 retrospective of the artist at the Art Museum of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China. This exhibition history affirms the painting’s importance within Zao’s oeuvre and the sustained scholarly attention it has received.
‘I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space, create a new dimension, tie in the cosmos, as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture.’ – Lucio Fontana
During the mid-20th century, as humantiy’s exploration of the universe entered a new chapter, artists began to rethink the boundaries of painting. For many, the universe was not merely a new subject, but also an uncharted realm. Lucio Fontana physically broke through the canvas to dissolve the boundary between his works and the infinite space, while Joan Miró, a close friend of Zao, created imaginary worlds by using stars, the night sky, and the cosmos as motifs. In response to the zeitgeist of that period, Zao drew on the abstract language of Chinese calligraphy and seal carving to direct his viewer’s gaze towards a space that could only be sensed but not seen. This artistic idiom reflects his ambition to transcend the boundaries of the canvas and open it onto infinite space.
Unlike mountains, rivers, trees, or human figures, the starry sky was not a common subject in traditional painting. It was only with the rapid development of astronomy in the mid-19th century, when new discoveries gave humanity unprecedented understanding of nebulae, the Milky Way, and outer space, that artists began to turn their attention to this real yetelusive subject. In 1845, Irish astronomer William Parsons first observed and documented the structure of a spiral nebula, offering the public unprecedented access to images of the cosmos. Scientific discoveries as such inspired the ways that artists thought about the starry sky. For example, whilst reflecting the state of his inner world, Van Gogh’s famous swirling canopy of stars in The Starry Night also echoes to a greater or lesser extent that new understanding of the nebulae and the universe. Following the 20th century, developments in psychology also influenced artistic movements such as Surrealism, transforming the cosmos from a mere object of scientific observation into a source of creative inspiration. Constellations and nebulae became important metaphors in the artists’ exploration of the subconscious, dreams, and their inner world. In the context of the tendency for art to mirror the intellectual developments of its time, Zao’s Voie Lactée represents a unique response to this spirit of exploration. Through an abstract language that fuses Eastern and Western cultures, the work addresses modern man’s reflections on the cosmos, nature, and human existence.
The sun and the moon seem to rise and set from it (the vast ocean); the Milky Way shines brilliantly, as if emerging from its depths.’ – Cao Cao, Viewing the Ocean (Guan Cang Hai)
If mountains, rivers, and trees represent the natural landscapes most familiar to human beings, then Voie Lactée turns instead toward a less familiar dimension of nature that had rarely been touched upon in the paintings before Zao’s time. At the centre of the work, a vertical form woven from shades of brownish-gold and deep blue cuts through the canvas from bottom to top, evoke a convergence of nebulae or rising mountain ranges. Symbols resembling oracle bone script are scattered across the surface like ancient relics drifting through the cosmos. Voie Lactée does not adhere to the conventions of traditional landscape painting: the composition lacks a distinct horizon, a fixed vantage point, or a defined direction of light. In traditional landscape paintings, space is often constructed through the interplay of light and shadow acrossobjects illuminated by natural light. In Zao’s work, however, the radiance appears to emerge from within the canvas itself. Sky-blue pigments interweave with the warm, golden-brown halo at the centre, deepening in tones as they extend towards the edges. Light seems to emanate from the surface, dissolving the boundaries between near and far, foreground and background – across the entire pictorial space. The dark, band-like structure running vertically through the centre of the composition is similarly difficult to define. It suggests either a celestial body emerging from chaos or a cosmic fissure opening onto infinite depths. This ephemerally expanding composition not only imbues the painting with a powerful sense of movement but also echoes the temporality inherent in Zao’s art. Just as Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting emphasise the flow of the brushstroke and the circulation of vital energy, the viewer’s gaze travels through the painting as he or she navigates the flow of its light, colour, and symbols.
Since ancient times, Chinese culture has been enriched by a profound fascination with the stars, the sky and the cosmos. This fascination is articulated in both ancient philosophy and poetry, from the philosophical definition – ‘The four corners together with the above and the below are called “Yu”; the past and the present are called “Zhou”’ to countless poems celebrating the Milky Way.. In this context, ‘Yu’ refers to the boundless expanse of space, while ‘Zhou’ encompasses time from the distant past to the present. Together, the two concepts form the basis of a holistic Chinese understanding of the universe. In light of this, Voie Lactée, to a certain extent, can be read as a visual manifestation of this cosmic consciousness. Its central vertical structure, extending upward across the canvas, suggests the boundlessness of space; its ochre-brown textures recall the weathered surfaces of Shang and Zhou dynasty bronze wares and oracle bone inscriptions; the symbols scattered across the canvas evoke messages transmitted from ancient civilizations. The continuous movement and transformation of brushstrokes further suggest the cyclical nature of time and the continuity between past and present.
Within the long tradition of Chinese landscape painting, the cosmos rarely appeared as a subject in it’s own right. Beyond the practical use of star charts to observe and record celestial phenomena, people made sense of this unfamiliar realm through literature, philosophy, and mythology. They personified the movements of the heavens, transforming cosmic cycles, eclipses, and planetary movements into deities and mythical figures like the dragon and the phoenix. Passed down through generations, these myths reveal not only how ancient people imagined the cosmos, but also their desire to decipher the mysteries of the natural world – an impulse that can be traced in Zao’s Voie Lactée. To the artist, the dragon, the firebird, and the Milky Way are not distinct subjects but rather different forms of the same spiritual quest. Through these symbols, he extends the language of Surrealism to explore the spiritual and philosophical dimensions of painting. The work demonstrates how human beings continue to transcend the boundaries between the visible and the invisible worlds through imagination and creation.
Science has since largely taken the place of mythology as a way of understanding the universe, yet both arise from the same human desire to comprehend our place within it. In this regard, Voie Lactée is not only a work about the cosmos, but also a dialogue that transcends time. From the star deities and mythological legends of the past, to the advances in astronomy and space exploration during the mid-20th century, human beings have continued their attempt to answer the same questions: Where do we stand, and how do we understand our relationship with cosmic time? Zao responds to these enduring questions through abstract painting. By interweaving the symbolic language of ancient civilizations with the modern imagination of infinite space on a single canvas, Zao turns Voie Lactée into one of the most cosmically attuned works of his artistic career.
After viewing Voie Lactée–09.11.56 in Zao’s studio, Claude Roy, a close friend of the artist as well as a French poet and critic, discussed with him the translation of the phrase da xiang wu xing (大象無形) from Tao Te Ching. At the time, some translators interpreted it as ‘The Great Form No Shape’ but Zao preferred ‘Great Painting Without Picture.’ This seemingly paradoxical translation offers a key to his understanding of painting. Roy believed that the sky in Voie Lactée did not require a horizon, trees, or any physical landscape to serve as a backdrop. Rather, the sky itself became the subject of the painting. As Roy put it, Zao appeared to have ‘unveiled the face of the Milky Way, as if our eyes were able to capture it in broad daylight.’ For Roy, Voie Lactée epitomised Zao’s extraordinary ability to transform that which was invisible into a visible experience.
However, this cosmic landscape – which seems to transcend reality – remains deeply rooted in Zao’s authentic experience of nature. Whether he was depicting mountains, rivers, wind, rain, the ocean, or the Milky Way, the artist never sought to capture the physical objects themselves, but rather the ever-flowing vitality and spatial depth that lie behind them. As the phrase da xiang wu xing from Tao Te Ching suggests, Voie Lactée is not merely a painting of celestial phenomena, but also an expression of vastness, distance, and infinity. The light that appears to emenate within the work disrupts the conventional principles of perspectives established by classical paintings, echoing the brand new imaginings of the cosmos, energy, and infinite space by artists of the 20th century. In an era when science continues to extend the limits of human knowledge, Zao Wou-Ki’s Voie Lactée–09.11.56 is a perfect embodiment of the dialogue between art and the intellectual currents of its time.
Against a magnificent field of layered blue washes, brownish-gold brushstrokes and oracle bone script-like symbols gather, dissolve, and flare outward from the canvas’s turbulent center, like a nebula in flux, radiantly expanding and receding across the sky. Created in 1956, Voie Lactée - 09.11.56 (Milky Way - 09.11.56) is the only known work by Zao Wou-Ki inspired by the Milky Way. Completed during Zao’s highly-acclaimed ‘oracle bone’ period (c. 1954–1958), this work reflects the distinctive style he developed at the time. Oracle bone script, the earliest known writing system from East Asia, originated during the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BCE). Used to record divinations, it served as a means of communicating with the heavens and seek guidance about the future. These divinations addressed a wide range of concerns, including agricultural affairs, celestial phenomena such as abundant harvest, rainfall, and solar and lunar eclipses, as well as ancestral worship and sacrificial offerings. Most of the surviving records were produced by the royal court under the direction of the Shang kings are known as ‘royal divination inscriptions.’ These inscriptions also addressed dreams, childbirths, marriages, hunting, travels, and affairs of the royal court. Carefully preserved as part of the royal annals in underground chambers after each divination, these oracle bone scripts have survived to the present day and become vital resources for historical research. In Voie Lactée, Zao transforms the pictographic symbols and world of this ancient civilization into abstract forms, creating a visual language that transcends time and reaches across the infinite universe. Through the work’s mysterious poetic radiance, Zao evokes the boundless imagination of the cosmos and the unknown worlds beyond it.
Zao’s works from his ‘oracle bone’ period were predominantly of small to medium sizes. Only 23 extant works from the period are of a size comparable to or larger than Voie Lactée, rendering it a masterpiece of museum collection calibre. This work has been exhibited at major institutions across Europe and Asia, including the Folkwang Museum, Essen, the Fukuoka Art Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art in Japan; and the Musée Ingres Bourdellein in Montauban. It was also featured in the major 2023 retrospective of the artist at the Art Museum of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China. This exhibition history affirms the painting’s importance within Zao’s oeuvre and the sustained scholarly attention it has received.
‘I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space, create a new dimension, tie in the cosmos, as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture.’ – Lucio Fontana
During the mid-20th century, as humantiy’s exploration of the universe entered a new chapter, artists began to rethink the boundaries of painting. For many, the universe was not merely a new subject, but also an uncharted realm. Lucio Fontana physically broke through the canvas to dissolve the boundary between his works and the infinite space, while Joan Miró, a close friend of Zao, created imaginary worlds by using stars, the night sky, and the cosmos as motifs. In response to the zeitgeist of that period, Zao drew on the abstract language of Chinese calligraphy and seal carving to direct his viewer’s gaze towards a space that could only be sensed but not seen. This artistic idiom reflects his ambition to transcend the boundaries of the canvas and open it onto infinite space.
Unlike mountains, rivers, trees, or human figures, the starry sky was not a common subject in traditional painting. It was only with the rapid development of astronomy in the mid-19th century, when new discoveries gave humanity unprecedented understanding of nebulae, the Milky Way, and outer space, that artists began to turn their attention to this real yetelusive subject. In 1845, Irish astronomer William Parsons first observed and documented the structure of a spiral nebula, offering the public unprecedented access to images of the cosmos. Scientific discoveries as such inspired the ways that artists thought about the starry sky. For example, whilst reflecting the state of his inner world, Van Gogh’s famous swirling canopy of stars in The Starry Night also echoes to a greater or lesser extent that new understanding of the nebulae and the universe. Following the 20th century, developments in psychology also influenced artistic movements such as Surrealism, transforming the cosmos from a mere object of scientific observation into a source of creative inspiration. Constellations and nebulae became important metaphors in the artists’ exploration of the subconscious, dreams, and their inner world. In the context of the tendency for art to mirror the intellectual developments of its time, Zao’s Voie Lactée represents a unique response to this spirit of exploration. Through an abstract language that fuses Eastern and Western cultures, the work addresses modern man’s reflections on the cosmos, nature, and human existence.
The sun and the moon seem to rise and set from it (the vast ocean); the Milky Way shines brilliantly, as if emerging from its depths.’ – Cao Cao, Viewing the Ocean (Guan Cang Hai)
If mountains, rivers, and trees represent the natural landscapes most familiar to human beings, then Voie Lactée turns instead toward a less familiar dimension of nature that had rarely been touched upon in the paintings before Zao’s time. At the centre of the work, a vertical form woven from shades of brownish-gold and deep blue cuts through the canvas from bottom to top, evoke a convergence of nebulae or rising mountain ranges. Symbols resembling oracle bone script are scattered across the surface like ancient relics drifting through the cosmos. Voie Lactée does not adhere to the conventions of traditional landscape painting: the composition lacks a distinct horizon, a fixed vantage point, or a defined direction of light. In traditional landscape paintings, space is often constructed through the interplay of light and shadow acrossobjects illuminated by natural light. In Zao’s work, however, the radiance appears to emerge from within the canvas itself. Sky-blue pigments interweave with the warm, golden-brown halo at the centre, deepening in tones as they extend towards the edges. Light seems to emanate from the surface, dissolving the boundaries between near and far, foreground and background – across the entire pictorial space. The dark, band-like structure running vertically through the centre of the composition is similarly difficult to define. It suggests either a celestial body emerging from chaos or a cosmic fissure opening onto infinite depths. This ephemerally expanding composition not only imbues the painting with a powerful sense of movement but also echoes the temporality inherent in Zao’s art. Just as Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting emphasise the flow of the brushstroke and the circulation of vital energy, the viewer’s gaze travels through the painting as he or she navigates the flow of its light, colour, and symbols.
Since ancient times, Chinese culture has been enriched by a profound fascination with the stars, the sky and the cosmos. This fascination is articulated in both ancient philosophy and poetry, from the philosophical definition – ‘The four corners together with the above and the below are called “Yu”; the past and the present are called “Zhou”’ to countless poems celebrating the Milky Way.. In this context, ‘Yu’ refers to the boundless expanse of space, while ‘Zhou’ encompasses time from the distant past to the present. Together, the two concepts form the basis of a holistic Chinese understanding of the universe. In light of this, Voie Lactée, to a certain extent, can be read as a visual manifestation of this cosmic consciousness. Its central vertical structure, extending upward across the canvas, suggests the boundlessness of space; its ochre-brown textures recall the weathered surfaces of Shang and Zhou dynasty bronze wares and oracle bone inscriptions; the symbols scattered across the canvas evoke messages transmitted from ancient civilizations. The continuous movement and transformation of brushstrokes further suggest the cyclical nature of time and the continuity between past and present.
Within the long tradition of Chinese landscape painting, the cosmos rarely appeared as a subject in it’s own right. Beyond the practical use of star charts to observe and record celestial phenomena, people made sense of this unfamiliar realm through literature, philosophy, and mythology. They personified the movements of the heavens, transforming cosmic cycles, eclipses, and planetary movements into deities and mythical figures like the dragon and the phoenix. Passed down through generations, these myths reveal not only how ancient people imagined the cosmos, but also their desire to decipher the mysteries of the natural world – an impulse that can be traced in Zao’s Voie Lactée. To the artist, the dragon, the firebird, and the Milky Way are not distinct subjects but rather different forms of the same spiritual quest. Through these symbols, he extends the language of Surrealism to explore the spiritual and philosophical dimensions of painting. The work demonstrates how human beings continue to transcend the boundaries between the visible and the invisible worlds through imagination and creation.
Science has since largely taken the place of mythology as a way of understanding the universe, yet both arise from the same human desire to comprehend our place within it. In this regard, Voie Lactée is not only a work about the cosmos, but also a dialogue that transcends time. From the star deities and mythological legends of the past, to the advances in astronomy and space exploration during the mid-20th century, human beings have continued their attempt to answer the same questions: Where do we stand, and how do we understand our relationship with cosmic time? Zao responds to these enduring questions through abstract painting. By interweaving the symbolic language of ancient civilizations with the modern imagination of infinite space on a single canvas, Zao turns Voie Lactée into one of the most cosmically attuned works of his artistic career.
After viewing Voie Lactée–09.11.56 in Zao’s studio, Claude Roy, a close friend of the artist as well as a French poet and critic, discussed with him the translation of the phrase da xiang wu xing (大象無形) from Tao Te Ching. At the time, some translators interpreted it as ‘The Great Form No Shape’ but Zao preferred ‘Great Painting Without Picture.’ This seemingly paradoxical translation offers a key to his understanding of painting. Roy believed that the sky in Voie Lactée did not require a horizon, trees, or any physical landscape to serve as a backdrop. Rather, the sky itself became the subject of the painting. As Roy put it, Zao appeared to have ‘unveiled the face of the Milky Way, as if our eyes were able to capture it in broad daylight.’ For Roy, Voie Lactée epitomised Zao’s extraordinary ability to transform that which was invisible into a visible experience.
However, this cosmic landscape – which seems to transcend reality – remains deeply rooted in Zao’s authentic experience of nature. Whether he was depicting mountains, rivers, wind, rain, the ocean, or the Milky Way, the artist never sought to capture the physical objects themselves, but rather the ever-flowing vitality and spatial depth that lie behind them. As the phrase da xiang wu xing from Tao Te Ching suggests, Voie Lactée is not merely a painting of celestial phenomena, but also an expression of vastness, distance, and infinity. The light that appears to emenate within the work disrupts the conventional principles of perspectives established by classical paintings, echoing the brand new imaginings of the cosmos, energy, and infinite space by artists of the 20th century. In an era when science continues to extend the limits of human knowledge, Zao Wou-Ki’s Voie Lactée–09.11.56 is a perfect embodiment of the dialogue between art and the intellectual currents of its time.