Between two tables / Zao Wou Ki

When Zao Wou-Ki arrived in Paris in April 1948, he spoke almost no French and knew

almost no one. He settled in Montparnasse, in a small studio next door to Giacometti, and

began learning the language at the Alliance Française.

Archive picture, Zao Wou-ki, his wife May and their daughter.

What he found in Paris, beyond the Impressionism that had drawn him there, was a circle of friendships that would sustain his work for the next sixty years.

His creative process was shaped by permanent dialogue with friends including Henri

Michaux, Edgar Varèse, Pierre Soulages, Georges Mathieu, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Maria Elena Viera da Silva, François Cheng, René Char, Alberto Giacometti and André Malraux. These were not passing acquaintances. Michaux wrote four texts about Zao's work over three decades, in 1949, 1952, 1970 and 1980.

Pierre Soulages and Zao Wou-Ki

It was Michaux who coined the phrase that would define Zao's entire oeuvre: L'espace est silence, space is silence. It was also through Michaux that Zao met the composer Edgar Varèse, with whom he formed a lasting friendship.

In 1964, he obtained French citizenship thanks to André Malraux. Later, Georges Pompidou

kept one of his paintings in his office at the Élysée. His studio on rue Jonquoy, a former

warehouse transformed by architect Georges Johannet, with no windows, light entering only

through the roof, a garden, a pond, trees and sculptures in the courtyard, became one of the quiet centres of Paris artistic life.

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Jacques Germain, Georges Mathieu, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Zao Wou-Ki and Pierre Loeb, Galerie Pierre, Paris, circa 1953. Credit Photo © Ministère de la Culture - Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Denise Colomb

At his table on the rue Jonquoy, East and West met without ceremony. The cuisine was Franco-Chinese, often prepared by Zao himself, who took pleasure in cooking for those he loved. He would alternate the dishes of his Pekinese childhood with the bistro classics of his adopted Paris, jiaozi alongside a leg of lamb, jasmine tea poured next to the wine of a guest. The food was generous, the table low and the conversation moved between poetry, painting, music and silence.

Zao believed these things were inseparable. He illustrated the texts of twenty poets over his career, Henri Michaux, René Char, Claude Roy, Yves Bonnefoy, and many of these collaborations were born around that table, between two courses, in the hours that stretch when one is not in a hurry. The painter Pierre Soulages, the composer Edgar Varèse, the architect Ieoh Ming Pei, the writer François Cheng, all came to share these meals. Paintings were traded from studio to studio in the same spirit, a canvas against another, after a dinner, the work and the friendship sealed in a single gesture.

For Zao, the act of eating together was another form of the same exchange: nourishment for the work, and for the friendships that made the work possible.