Zao Wou-Ki was one of the first painters of globalisation, that is to say, not only a painter who experienced the physical separation of the world, the distance between views and the coming together of cultures, but also someone who guessed that behind the reinvention of representation in abstraction a new global art was emerging, an art made of the sharing of views, of the confluence of traditions. He anticipated our time more than he assimilated his own. Let us set out to discover it. Putting aside the ancestral Chinese tradition of working with ink, which he had assimilated as a child, Zao Wou-Ki explains that he began learning oil painting in 1935 and that it took him over 30 years to understand it. But he returned to this practice in the early 1970s and through this return to a medium he had previously practiced with confidence, Zao found, as he put it, "a new way of working that would expand my universe". Indeed, Zao incorporated wash effects and textural strokes from ink paint into his abstract oil paintings. Zao's ink paintings are among his finest works.