The piece is an etching made using aquatint. By carefully controlling the particle size, density, coverage, acid concentration, and corrosion time of an anti-corrosion agent, such as powdered rosin, Zao was able create rich and layered light effects and brush-like textures. The complexity of this work lies within the artist’s use of three similarly sized copper plates and six layers of colouring to achieve rich and expressive effects. Zao had to predict the results of every layer of colouring and had to be as accurate as possible during the printing process to prevent the images from misaligning or overlapping. This work therefore not only demonstrates Zao’s pursuit of abstract expressionism by emphasising the tensions of colouring, brushstrokes, and linework, but it also represents his exceptional skills as a printmaker and his confidence in handling complex mediums.

Zao gained international fame for his oil paintings, but his prints are equally outstanding. In 1949, less than a year after moving from Shanghai to Paris, Zao started making lithographs in the studio of master printmaker Edmond Desjobert. When creating his first lithograph, Zao found that, like ink on rice paper, pigments applied to lithographs often produced unexpected effects. Even when he added more than the usual amount of water to the pigments, he was still delighted with the results. Due to the high cost of printmaking, Zao’s prints were limited to three colours in the early 1950s as exemplified in Rural Idyll (image below), but as his technique became more refined, his prints came to include as many as six, eight, and even ten colours. In addition to lithography and aquatint etching, Zao also skilled at sugar-lift etching, taking advantage of the indirect and unexpected nature of printmaking to experiment freely with the harmonies and tensions between the spatial arrangements, colours, and lines in his works.

Many art historians examine Zao’s style from 1960 onwards through the lens of abstract expressionism because he met various American abstract expressionists, such as Franz Kline and Phillip Guston, on a trip to New York in 1957.^[1] Zao was deeply fascinated by their use of abstraction and action painting techniques to convey strong emotions and the impression of velocity. This experience led to his decision to stop naming his works from the late 1950s and to move away from figuration. Instead, he turned to layering and the unrestrained blending, interweaving, and contrasting of colours and lines to arouse visual associations within viewers of his works. Unlike the spontaneous paintings or highly rational abstract art of the West, however, Zao’s works reflect the Eastern concept of yijing—a total integration of internal and external worlds—as well as the roots of Chinese painting.

Take the Untitled (1968) piece for example. The composition draws on the imagery of a river with two banks often found in Chinese landscape paintings. Winding, climbing dark brown hues in the foreground are interspersed with broad, undulating brushstrokes and fine scatterings of smaller strokes. This intertwining brings to mind a scene of towering trees trembling in the wind on the banks of a river. The great expanse of white in the middle not only echoes Chinese painting’s distinctive technique of creating blank spaces but also creates a broad and far-reaching river view that evokes a sense of peace and tranquillity. Meanwhile, a background rooted in a light ochre tone, with loosely smeared patches of brown and crimson in the print’s centre and right side, combine with bold and forceful brushstrokes to give the impression of mountains dyed red beneath a rolling sunset sky. From this work, it is apparent that Zao’s abstraction was a process of extracting emotional activity from an objective world. Drawing on feelings and perceptions he experienced in nature, Zao combined concepts of traditional Chinese painting with the intense colour usage and unrestrained brushwork of Western abstract expressionism to bring the inner spirit, character, vitality, and dynamism of nature to life on the canvas. This great degree of emotional expression also allows viewers to discover the boundless possibilities that exist between obscurity and realism.

Zao once said that ‘everyone is bound by a tradition. I am bound by two’.^[2] Faced with both the realist style prevalent in Chinese art in the 1950s and the formal constraints of traditional Chinese painting, Zao chose to forge an alternative path by drawing on various contrasting artistic concepts he learned in Paris and New York as well as the inspiration and serendipity that printmaking continued to bring him. In looking at Zao’s works, one senses not only the integration of different mediums, such as printmaking and painting, but also his confidence and mastery in harnessing different artistic concepts from both the East and West.