When Namiki asked Zao Wou-Ki, one of the greatest artists of our time to decorate a pen, the latter was both amused by the idea to exercise his talent on an unusual support and attracted by this new expression which gave him the opportunity to take part in the creation of a beautiful project.

Born in Beijing, Zao Wou-Ki studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux Arts of Hangzhou before coming to Paris in 1948. His work is the symbol of the fusion of culture and artistic expressions between France and China.

The painter who has always had close ties with writers and poets (A.Malraux, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Claude Roy, Yves Bonnefoy and of course Henri Michaux who dedicated his "Jeux d'encre"... to him), has been especially inspired by this writing instrument, a reservoir of ink and thought that the English have poetically called "Fountain Pen", and that the Japanese when they discovered it, have called the "Brush of 10,000 years"

To decorate it, he has drawn from the sources of calligraphy, interpreting in his own style the ideograms finely engraved four thousand years ago on the chinese bronzes. The great artists who master the art of lacquer this modern version of the ancestral writing on each of the 50 numbered copies published by Namiki and which bear the name of "Zao Wou-Ki"