Zao Wou-Ki - Telegraph Immediately rejecting his heritage, he started off by emulating Paul Klee; his distinctive collisions of Oriental and Occidental pictorial forms, which sought harmony through lavish and often ethereal painterly experiments, did not emerge until the mid- to late Fifties. Working on set designs for a Roland Petit ballet in 1954 prompted him to experiment with a new style: "My painting became unreadable, still-lifes and flowers no longer existed." This preceded a desire to return to his roots. In a 1961 interview he said: "I have gradually rediscovered China; it has affirmed itself as my deeper personality. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is to Paris I owe this return to my deepest origins. To President Chirac, he served as an unofficial cultural ambassador, accompanying him on a trip to China in 1997. Chirac wrote the preface to the exhibition catalogue for the artist's first major Chinese retrospective in Shanghai in 1998, and appointed him to the Legion of Honour in 2006. In 1958 the Tate Gallery in London acquired Zao's painting Before the Storm; but in a letter to the gallery in 1974 he suggested that the title was misleading: "Since 1967 I have only given my pictures the date as reference... if my painting looks like a landscape, this is completely accidental; as for the Chinese influence, it is, I think, in spite of myself." The vast majority of Zao's sold paintings now rest in private Asian collections after demand for his work took off in Taiwan, where traditional Chinese values were upheld throughout Mao's reign. His abstraction is perceived very differently in the East. The Chinese will look at the painting and see a mountain, the wind, water - much more than the single brushstroke they might see in the West," said de Sarthe, not missing the irony that a painter who spent a lifetime pursuing an aesthetic unity between two very different cultures now divides the international modern art market. Zao was described as a "small, kind, very knowledgeable man with exceptionally intelligent eyes" and "a devil on the tennis court" by his American gallerist Pierre Levai, of Marlborough Fine Art. Zao Wou-Ki is survived by his third wife, Francois Marquet, and by a son from his first marriage . Zao Wou-Ki, born February 13 1921, died April 9 2013