Zao Wou-Ki: A Life in Print

This is an edited transcript of a keynote panel by Wu Mo for The Politics of Print: elephant in the room, staged in January 2026 as part of STPI's annual Print Show & Symposium.

In 2021, M+ received a donation of 12 works by Zao Wou-Ki from the artist’s daughter, Sin-May Roy Zao, including two oil paintings, one watercolour work, and nine prints spanning the artist’s career from 1945 to 2005. Then in 2024, we received another generous donation of more than 220 prints and proofs, two-dozen illustrated books and folios, alongside associated materials, to represent the full trajectory of Zao’s practice in the print medium, from his third wife Madame Françoise Marquet-Zao, chairman of Fondation Zao Wou-Ki. These donations made it possible to outline Zao Wou-Ki: Master Printmaker (2025-2026), the first special exhibition at M+ to focus on prints, which introduced audiences to what makes this medium special, and its crucial role in Zao’s practice.

While commonly known as a modern master of painting, Zao had an incredibly rich relationship with print as a medium, with prints forming an important part of his body of work. To tell this story, we structured the exhibition into three major chapters, to follow the development of Zao’s printmaking practice in chronological order, alongside three thematic side-sections to introduce what printmaking is, how printmaking brings people together, and how poetry and prints enrich each other—all through the lens of how Zao positioned print in his life and work.

The exhibition opened with a timeline and archival images recounting Zao’s life before he went to Paris in 1948. He was born in 1920 into a wealthy and cultured family in China. His grandfather, a well-educated scholar, enlightened Zao to learn about traditional Chinese art, especially calligraphy, while his father, a successful banker, supported these efforts. He studied in Hangzhou during the Second World War under the teachers Wu Dayu and Lin Fengmian, who were educated in Paris and naturally encouraged Zao to pursue his own art career there, since he was such an admirer of Western modern art. In one photo from 1948, Zao is pictured next to his first wife, the artist Lalan, just after landing in Paris from Shanghai. Zao immediately immersed himself, going straight to the Louvre that first day. There, he saw masterpieces by Picasso, Matisse, and others, for whom prints also played an important role, so it felt natural for Zao to approach print soon after.

Printmaking ateliers were prevalent in Paris after the war and popular with emerging artists because it enabled them to try something different. Zao learned lithography and etching in 1949 from the famous printmaker Edmond Desjobert, immediately falling in love with the medium because it allowed room for experimentation. The range of subject matters that Zao explored at the time included animals, landscapes, and nudes, with the influences of Western modern art visible in their arrangements. Throughout, Zao experimented with colour, creating vibrant combinations while developing his own techniques and styles. With that in mind, one of the exhibition’s first side-sections focused on Zao’s practice prints, especially his printing proofs, to unpack the complex processes he engaged with. Apart from using BFK Rives paper, which is a very common cotton paper used by a lot of Western print makers, Zao creatively used washi paper he found in Japan and Xuan paper that he brought from China to explore their different effects, while integrating Chinese aesthetics and philosophical thoughts into his practice.

Looking at Zao’s prints next to his oil paintings from the same period shows his skill at navigating different mediums while exploring effects and concepts between them. In fact, French publisher Robert Godet was so impressed by Zao’s first batch of lithographs that he showed them to the French poet Henri Michaux. Michaux was so moved that he composed eight poems in response. Godet then grouped Zao’s lithographs and Michaux’s poems into an illustrated poetry book, Lecture par Henri Michaux de huit lithographies de Zao Wou-Ki (A Reading of Eight Lithographs of Zao Wou-Ki by Henri Michaux) (1950). This not only marked the start of a lifelong friendship between the artist and poet, but also marked the start of Zao’s collaborations with printmakers, publishers and poets, which formed the basis of the exhibition’s second side-story, about how printmaking brings people together.

To Zao, printmaking was not just about doing something alone, because it required him to go into printmaking studios and collaborate. Printmaking studios were little salons or cultural hubs where new ideas and concepts were generated with others. Zao enjoyed this process: that much is clear in archival photos of him in these studios, where he was involved in every step. Key collaborators included printmaker Edmond Desjoubert, and poets René Char and François Cheng, as well as publishers and gallerists like Nesto Jacometti and Pierre Loeb.

On average, Zao spent one to two months per year immersing himself in the studios, and throughout his career, he would be commissioned to make posters and invitations for his exhibitions, as well as illustrate a significant number of modern Western poetry books. Among these books is a 1978 collection of elegies by the Senegalese poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, which was illustrated by Zao and a group of artists including Hans Hartung, Maria Helena Veira da Silva, and Pierre Soulages, in a collaboration initiated by Galerie de France.

Demonstrating his broader public influence, the same prints by Zao that were used to support students participating in the protests across France in 1968, were later used to promote the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988 and Barcelona in 1992. At the same time, he would also make personal greeting cards for friends and collaborators, revealing how intimate his relationship with the medium became.

By the end of the 1950s, Zao entered the full swing of abstraction, and as part of the show, we felt it was important to juxtapose print, watercolour and oil painting works side by side, to show how Zao permeated different modes of thinking and doing across mediums. On one wall, an abstracted landscape in cold earthen tones appears in the form of an untitled 1977 watercolour, as well as a 1978 oil painting, titled 10.03.78, which became reference points for a 1978 print. Although the compositions appear similar, Zao applied subtly different touch ups to both.

The exhibition’s final chapter emphasised the difference in how Zao engaged both mediums. Among the final prints he made on his own was the largest print Zao ever made in 1990, at nearly one-metre long, and an oil painting, 29.02.88 (1988), of almost the same size and from around that time. The two pieces share the same composition: a blue wash that rises to a red horizon, bordered by green. But Zao actually applied 14 colours on that single print, where the colour tone is brighter and more transparent than the oil painting, demonstrating how skillful he had become as a printmaker. 

While Zao stopped executing prints by himself in the year 2000, at already 80 years old, he did not stop collaborating with printmakers. Several ink paintings and watercolours by Zao were translated by printmakers as prints in the years before his death in 2013. We included one of these later screenprints in the concluding section: a composition of colourful washes made after one of Zao’s watercolour paintings in 2009. The print is titled Ibiza (Talamanca), after the Mediterranean island where Zao would spend his summers since the mid-1970s, in a home and studio designed by his friend, the Catalan architect, Josep Lluis Sert.

This enduring relationship with print foregrounded our final side-story, which positioned Zao as a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural figure, by tracing his continuous engagement with Western poets and novelists throughout the post-war era. Here, we included a quote by Zao on the walls, which illuminated his ability to cross cultures as fluidly as he moved between printing and painting. Reflecting on the influences in his work, he talks about how he paradoxically rediscovered China through Paris—a return, he said, to his deepest origins.