Zao Wou-ki works donated to M+ museum in Hong Kong by the late Chinese painter’s stepdaughter

When Zao moved to Paris he decided not to work in ink to avoid being pegged as a Chinese painter, and at the same time discovered the art of print-making

Nine of the 12 works Sin-May Roy Zao has given to M+ are prints by Zao, for whom the medium was a ‘wonderful playground’, the museum’s curator Lesley Ma says

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Zao Wou-ki at an exhibition of his work in Hong Kong in 2003. Sin-May Roy Zao, the daughter of Zao’s second wife, Chan May-kan, has donated 12 of his works to Hong Kong’s M+ museum of visual culture. Photo: SCMP

Published: 9:00pm, 10 Mar 2022Updated: 2:36pm, 11 Mar 2022

It had all the makings of a classic romance. He a handsome Bohemian artist and she a beautiful, glamorous actress. Both were nursing a broken heart. Both were eager for a new start.

In 1958, Zao Wou-ki had flown to Hong Kong from Paris, where the Beijing-born artist had lived for a decade, after his first wife, Xie Jing-lan, left him for her lover, a fellow artist. Friends eager to distract him from his woes introduced him to a fellow divorcee, Chan May-kan, also known as May Choo and Chen Meiqin, a Hong Kong actress. It was love at first sight.

They promptly got married and Zao, Chan and her young daughter Sin-may moved back to Paris and lived among one of the most exciting artistic milieus – their home was adjacent to Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti’s studio and the Zaos’ close friends included fellow émigrés Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and French artists Pierre Soulages and Hans Hartung.

Tragically Chan, who had a history of mental illness, would take her own life in 1972 at the age of 42.

When we started building the M+ collection, we had a blueprint and Zao really fit into that. But who can afford him?

Lesley Ma, M+ museum’s curator of ink art

These was the extraordinary circumstances in which Chan’s daughter, Sin-May Roy Zao, spent her formative years and the context of her donation to Hong Kong’s M+ museum of a collection of artworks by her famous stepfather, to whom she remained close until his death in 2013 at the age of 93.