Installed in France since the forty' s of the last century, Zao Wou-Ki has joined, like no other artist, the knowledge of Chinese painting and calligraphy with the individualist and subjective experience of the western abstract art. Impressed by Paul Klee' s paintings and impeled by Henry Michaux and Andre Malraux, two of the most active French intellectuals of the second post war, Zao Wou-Ki has kept deepening in his particular introspective journey for over five decades. All his work seems to restore an immense inner landscape, no exempt of dissonances and shadows. This book collects, for the first time, the clues of his creative approach through his writings and interviews and a significant selection of his works from his early works to date. 130 illustrations