ZAO WOU-KI

Zao Wou-ki (1920–2013) owes his greatness to the artistic patrimony of France, or so proposed the exhibition “L’Espace Est Silence” (“Space Is Silence”) held at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Museum chief curator Francois Michaud and independent curator Erik Verhagen assembled more than 40 large-scale oil paintings and ink works on paper from the mid-1950s through the early 2000s by the Beijing-born artist—“a figure at the crossroads of no less than three worlds,” they noted—though they declared the exhibition was not a retrospective. Instead, “Space Is Silence” focused on the period after Zao began to work in “a new idiom described as ‘abstract,’” beginning around the time of his painting (“Passage through Appearances,” 1956), a horizontal, ivory canvas with a tangle of black and burnt sienna markings across its median.