Although Paris was Zao Wou-Ki's home from 1948, it was New York — a city that the artist first discovered in 1957 during a trip with the French artist Pierre Soulages — that brought Zao new inspiration and marked the beginning of a new phase in his artistic journey. Contact with Abstract Expressionist painters such as Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Conrad Marca-Relli, William Baziotes and Adolph Gottlieb, among others, opened up Zao’s brushwork and caused him to develop a bolder style and master bigger canvases.

In 1957, the same year as Zao’s first visit in the U.S., the works of Mark Tobey, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock reflected the influences of Eastern culture in America.

With the figure of Zao Wou-Ki we begin to weave an intricate artistic web of the postwar era between a devastated Europe, a promising America and an intriguing Asia — a time that we still experience the resonance of.