The Chinese-French painter Zao Wou-Ki (1920–2013) developed a distinctive abstract style blending the visual poetry of Chinese painting and calligraphy with European pictorial traditions. This stunning volume presents a richly woven narrative of the artist’s life and work. Reintroducing Zao’s work to a North American audience, the authors make a substantial contribution to scholarship on transnational art movements in the 20th and 21st centuries. Their essays consider the reception of Zao’s work in the United States; his engagement with post-war abstraction; and his exploration of various artistic media. Zao Wou-Ki lived and worked at the intersection of two cultures. He blended Chinese calligraphic and ink painting aesthetics with European printmaking and abstract oil painting, becoming one of the earliest trans-cultural painters of the 20th century. His legacy reverberates in the global success of Chinese artists today.

No Limits: Zao Wou-Ki

Arts & Photography

Yun, Michelle

Walt, Melissa

Weitz, Ankeney

History & Criticism

Other Distribution

Shiva Ahmadi's art relates a gripping universal story of beauty and humanity that persists even in the face of the brutalities of war
Growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the artist Shiva Ahmadi recalls, she knew more about Jackson Pollock than Behzad, the master miniature painter of the Safavid court. Indeed, Ahmadi’s distinct painterly style seems to combine the detailed precision of Behzad’s hand with the fluid action painting of Pollock. What emerges is part miniature, part abstract expressionism―a decidedly 21st century art form that is both bold and contemporary.
The confounding world where peace and war coexist, where beauty and destruction twirl together. This, Ahmadi reminds us, is the world seen through the eyes of a small child coming of age in war time Iran who then emigrates to the US to find it also entering a decade of warfare. Her artistic approach―drawing on allegory and imagery and insisting on gentle beautiful aesthetic perspectives keeps the work from becoming dogmatic or didactic.

Shiva Ahmadi

Grigor, Talinn

Individual Artists

Skira

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Books by Yun, Michelle