Zao Wou-Ki is one of the most illustrious representatives of Lyrical Abstraction. He succeeds in the synthesis between the technical means of his Far Eastern heritage, and the plastic and poetic ambition of Western lyrical abstraction. The ink allows him to reinterpret abstraction according to the Chinese conception of gesture and space, as before oil, a Western technique, had determined him to deviate from his early education. In both cases, the notions of encounter and passage are central. Zao Wou-Ki does not like the word "landscape", preferring the word "nature". Its relations with the outside world are made of discoveries and travels, fruitful encounters, the first of which with Henri Michaux and the composer Edgar Varèse. Poetry and music will remain for him two permanent poles, like a necessary tension with painting - giving meaning, as his art asserts itself, to the expression that the artist inspired very early on in Michaux: Space is silence.