Zao Wou-Ki

Zao Wou-Ki is a Chinese painter and engraver, naturalized French, who was born in Beijing in 1920 and died in Nyon (Switzerland) in 2013. Trained at the Hangzou School of Fine Arts, he moved to Paris in 1949 and attended the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière and befriended many French and foreign artists. While his early work consisted mostly of realistic paintings, from his discovery of Paul Klee he turned towards abstraction and then lyrical abstraction. Internationally renowned, decorated several times in France, he was the object of a renewed attention in his country of origin from the 1980s.