Sans titre (Untitled)

‘I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on – and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions… The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.’ – Mark Rothko, 1956

Amid the sweeping tide of modernism, Zao Wou-Ki and Mark Rothko, working on opposite sides of the world, arrived independently at a shared pursuit: an inward search articulated through the language of abstraction. Both artists extended the Surrealist exploration of the unconscious, using colour and form as vessels for emotion. Unfolding the invisible across the canvas, they pushed the boundaries of visual perception and expanded the possibilities of painting itself.

In the post-war era, the growing use of ‘Untitled’ as a title in 20th-century art reflected a form of ‘namelessness after naming’. Between the presence and absence of a title, the work is situated in a liminal space where the image asserts its own meaning beyond the limits of language. The present work marks a pivotal moment in Zao’s artistic development within this broader current, foreshadowing the use of date-based titles that would come to define his later practice.

‘Gradually, I came to understand that my paintings reflect everything I have experienced. Sometimes when I contemplate a finished work, I am astonished to see that it expresses my anger, my serenity, or the calm that slowly returns after moments of intensity. My paintings become indicators of emotion, as I lay bare my innermost feelings and states of mind.’ – Zao Wou-Ki

Written characters are stripped of their form and structure, their spirit elevated to a higher realm of expression. It is within this emotional experience – one that lies beyond words – that titles lose their importance as explanation and give way to the imagery of the painting itself, whose meanings emerge through the interaction between image and perception. Painted in 1957, the monumental Untitled represents a recent discovery that is not included in the Foundation’s catalogue raisonné. In the year it was created, the painting was showcased at Galerie Charpentier in Paris as part of a major group exhibition devoted to the Nouvelle École de Paris. After being exhibited in 1957, the present work did not appear on the market for nearly 70 years, and its reappearance today offers fresh insight into a little-known facet of Zao’s artistic life in Paris. The painting brings together the evolution of the Chinese writing system and landscape imagery, allowing a modern expression of the unity of poetry and painting to emerge organically. Soft washes of orange spread along the edges of the canvas, while layered tones of brown converge at its centre, evoking the contours of a mountain range. The painting carries a profound emotional journey from the artist’s life; it stands like a stele, inscribed with traces of his travels and aspirations. This compositional vocabulary, which combines inner and outer framing, first appeared in Zao’s early works and continued into his later practice. Among the over 170 works produced during his Oracle Bone period, only around 20 employ this particular structure. It may be understood as part of the artist’s continuous exploration of transforming inner thought into artistic creation.

Since its founding in 1919, Galerie Charpentier had served as a leading platform for the promotion of Impressionism and modern art. After Raymond Nacenta assumed its direction in 1941, the gallery became increasingly dedicated to championing the most progressive artistic currents of the time, including Surrealism and the Nouvelle École de Paris. It saw artists such as Georges Mathieu, Hans Hartung, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Pierre Soulages rising to prominence in the Parisian art world. Zao’s Untitled was included in the gallery’s 1957 group exhibition devoted to the Nouvelle École de Paris and stood as the only work by an Asian artist in the showcase, placing it in direct dialogue with the avant-garde artistic voices of the time. Although scholars have long associated Zao with the Nouvelle École de Paris, this recent discovery is further proof that by this time he had forged close ties with one of the most influential artistic institutions of post-war Paris and become part of its inner circle. It opens up a new and crucial chapter in the scholarly understanding of Zao’s artistic career.

‘All of us who use Chinese characters carry and inherit a tradition. I paint these forms because they are the foundation of my emotions... For me, the characters are a door, connecting the external world with my inner world.’ – Zao Wou-Ki

The influence of ‘the unity of poetry and painting’ in Chinese art, along with the inspiration from his close friend, the poet Henri Michaux, marked a turning point in Zao’s artistic career. He began to pursue painting more consciously as a form of authentic expression that transcended language while remaining connected to the essence of Chinese characters. This, in turn, deepened his reflection on the relationship between words, poetry and image in Chinese culture. Of Zao’s untitled works painted between 1954 and 1957, only 15 are known today. With its distinct narrative quality, Untitled may be seen as an important precursor to Zao’s complete embrace of date-based titles after 1958. During this period, the title ‘Untitled’ represented a deliberate naming strategy, signalling the artist’s intention to free his work from the referential and interpretive aspects of language, allowing the painting itself to speak. The image became a vessel for emotion and narrative, opening onto a poetic realm that embodies the concept of ‘poetry within painting’.

In Untitled, the overlapping layers of brown tones and the movement of the brushwork reveal the interplay between calligraphy and pictorial representation. In this composition, the dynamic of the brushwork and underlying structure invite comparison with the running-cursive calligraphy of Huang Tingjian and the compositional force of Northern Wei regular script. They possess both the fluidity and broken rhythms of cursive calligraphy and the gravitas of ancient stone inscriptions. By deconstructing the framework of written characters into abstract signs, the artist instills into the composition a structural quality reminiscent of an inscribed stele, constructing a visual language that is at once legible and ritualistic.

In this sense, the imagery of Untitled resonates with the stillness and depth of Wang Wei’s poetry. In the lines, ‘A solitary plume of smoke rises straight above the desert, as the setting sun hangs round over the long river’, a spatial structure is articulated with extraordinary concision. Contrasting linear elements converge in expanses of emptiness, creating both a serene sense of space and a quiet emotional tension. As Su Shi observed of Wang Wei: ‘In his poetry there are paintings; in his paintings there is poetry’. In a similar vein, the landscape in Untitled is glimpsed from within the abstract structure of ‘characters’ – at once mountain peaks and brushstrokes, their forms hovering between definition and ambiguity. A touch of blue-green emerges within a field of warm colours, evoking the poetic spirit of landscape and giving the composition its defining accent. Zao’s Untitled reanimates this tradition through the language of abstraction, where the act of viewing becomes an experience akin to reading poetry – not guided by a title, but unfolding gradually through colour, structure, and brushwork to reveal its inner narrative and perceptual resonance. The same impulse is evident in Vent (Wind), which is widely regarded as Zao’s first abstract painting and is currently held in the collection of the Centre Pompidou. Having turned away from figurative imagery, he used the dynamic of calligraphic brushwork and layered washes of colour to transform the structure of characters into an invisible current that courses through the composition. It marks his first attempt to unite abstraction with narrative.

This transformation of calligraphic qualities may be traced to deeper cultural origins. As the earliest known form of Chinese writing, the oracle bone script developed through the gradual condensation and abstraction of ancient pictorial forms. Its pictographic nature and the emergence of its symbolic forms not only preserved the earliest memories of Chinese civilisation, but also laid the aesthetic foundation for the Chinese artistic conception that calligraphy and painting share a common origin. Through the millennia-long evolution of seal, clerical, cursive, running and regular scripts, Chinese characters served not only as the bearers of history, but also as the embodied continuation of emotion and memory. It is within this tradition that Zao revitalised the potential of the characters as a visual and spiritual medium for the modern age. Even when freed from explicit semantic meaning, the forms of the characters lie between the recognisable and the indistinct, opening a space for contemplation and inviting the viewer to wander in it.

The historical significance of Untitled is unmistakable. From the presence of distinct colour fields in the painting, one can see Zao’s tireless exploration of emotion and spirituality. The composition unfolds with concision and focus: orange spreads gently from the edges of the canvas, giving way to layers of brown and darker tones at the centre, creating a clear yet highly charged division of colour. This dynamic structure lends the composition a solid, unshakeable sense of weight, like a stone stele standing beneath the blazing sun. This compositional approach, suggesting both an outer and an inner frame, can already be discerned in Zao’s early works. Through layered washes of colours, the artist constructs a spatial depth tinged with uncertainty – a spiritual realm poised between the real and the unreal, suffused with the floating, dreamlike sensibility of Surrealism. From the landscapes of 1949, in which the real and the unreal merge, to the exploration of the unity of poetry and painting in the present work, one can trace Zao’s shift towards making the structure of colour fields and colour blocks the central language of his art, probing deeper into inner emotions and spiritual states. Colour no longer serves the depiction of external forms, but becomes a medium through which emotion and consciousness are expressed.

This development may also be understood within a broader art-historical context. In the post-war period, artists in both East and West, working within different cultural traditions and artistic contexts, turned almost simultaneously to colour fields as a primary means of expression, exploring the spiritual dimensions that painting could reach. During the same period, Rothko created immersive emotional spaces through the simplification of colour, the dissolution of boundaries, and the meticulous orchestration of colour relationships. Zao Wou-Ki, by contrast, unearthed a spiritual space through the interplay of script-like brushwork and layered colour fields, where the poetic qualities of Chinese characters converge with the language of Western abstraction. As he observed: ‘I do not need to look for other subjects, nor do I have to rely on any particular colour. What truly expresses my anger is not a single colour, but the relationships between colours: how they blend, how they oppose one another, how they love one another, and how they repel one another.’ (Zao Wou-Ki and Françoise Marquet, Self-Portrait, Taipei, 1992, p. 114) Although they followed different paths, both artists ultimately sought to move beyond representation and narrative, arriving at a conception of painting in which colour becomes a means of reaching the inner self. On the level of imagery, Zao employs an almost Surrealist construction of space, creating a visual experience that seems to hover between reality and dream. The forms in the painting suggest mountains and landscape, which linger between figurative depiction and abstraction. This space serves not merely as the setting for visual forms, but comes into being through the movement of emotion itself. It is in the ineffable that the painting touches upon the deeper truths of the unconscious, awakening an inner resonance.

As a scholarly discovery of considerable significance, Untitled proves to be a pioneering work in Zao’s use of the title ‘Untitled’. It also bears witness to the extent to which the artist had become immersed in Paris’s avant-garde art circle by the mid-1950s, while demonstrating his exploration of colour fields as a vessel for spirituality and his modern reinterpretation of calligraphy. Bringing together the distillation of personal emotion, the synthesis of Eastern and Western artistic vocabularies, and the broader post-war search for spirituality in abstract art, the present work occupies a vital place in Zao’s oeuvre, and it stands as a rare and representative work of his artistic practice during the 1950s.