"I would like my paintings to be simpler, with a greater sense of space; I have always been trying to achieve this kind of feeling of spaciousness." Once an artist has reached the mature stage of their career, their attitude towards painting tends to become more relaxed, and their work takes on an extra level of refinement. After several decades of painting, Zao Wou-ki's artistic pathway has become steadily broader and more expansive. The overall trend in Zao's oil painting style since the 1980s can be summarized as a shift away the "painting of feeling" towards the "painting of space."

The autobiography that Zao Wou-ki published in 1980 contains the following passage: "All I do now is to concentrate whole-heartedly on my painting, however the spirit takes me, and with whatever colors I feel I need. Color is everything, and yet nothing; you must be extremely sparing in your use of it, even to the point of stinginess. ("Maintenant je ne cherche rien d'autre qu'à faire un tableau, sous l'emprise du moment et la couleur, où représenter à la fois tout et rien, avec économie, parcimonie même.") These comments reflect Zao's feeling at the time that painting would always be an integral part of his life. However, with the passing of time, Zao has come to view things differently. In discussing what he has learnt after an artistic career of nearly half a century, Zao emphasizes the importance of one particular painting by Matisse – "The Window" – which he considers to be the single most important painting of the 20th century. As Zao explains it, "I wanted to fuse heaven and earth, and the opening in this painting gave me inspiration; it made me want to enter it. This was a path towards the infinite that only color could provide." (J'ai essayé d'y mêler la terre et le ciel, inspiré par l'ouverture suggérée ou j'ai voulu m'engouffrer. C'est un chemin vers l'infini par le seul recours à la couleur.") Following the needs of color and his own inspiration at that particular moment in time gave Zao Wou-ki's work from the 1980s a particularly sense of expertise and refinement, unlike the more passionate, vigorous character of his earlier work.

The art critic François Jacob made the following incisive comments regarding Zao Wou-ki's work during the period 1980 – 1985. He suggested that Zao displayed "an outlook that continues to regard all possibilities, it is the origin that existed before the world was formed, it is a road, leading not to the end, but source back to its origins, confined within tangibles and intangibles, this is where the paintings by Zao Wou-ki leads us to, a world that has yet to determine its form, still in suspension, hesitating, in its last flight prior to the birth of order...The perpetuity of Zao' s paintings lies in their questioning of the world, in their efforts to recreate. Certain paintings depict the furor of origin; the ripples of energy clashing abrasively and the turbulence that occurs before the scenery take form and shape. Some other paintings display the obstinacy of nebulas, or the birth of light, the invention of water, the first dawn, or beyond the turbulent upheavals of matter, present life indistinctly emerging. ("Un regard encore ouvert à tous les possibles. Un état qui précède le monde. Une route qui conduit, non à l'achèvement, mais à l'origine, aux confines de ce qui n'est pas encore. C'est là que nous entraîne la peinture de Zao Wou-ki, vers un espace qui n'est pas encore déterminé, mais reste en suspens, hésite, plane un dernier instant avant de basculer dans ce qui, plus tard, deviendra un ordre…. Il y a dans la peinture de Zao Wou-ki, une perpétuelle mise en question du monde. Un acharnement à le re-créer. Certaines de ses toiles évoquent la fureur des origins, l'enfantement de la matière par l'énergie, les derniers soubresauts des explosions créatrices. D'autres déploient l'indocilité moqueuse des nébuleuses. Ou la naissance de la lumière. Ou l'invention de l'eau. Ou le premier matin, comme ce merveilleux petit triptyque aux blancs rosés. Et en filigrane, par-delà les convulsions de la matière, comme prête à sourdre, la vie.") (Zao Wou-ki & Françoise Marquet, Zao Wou-ki, Autoportrait, Fayard, Paris, 1986, pp. 186-187)

This particular painting, "27.8.84," is a classic example of Zao Wou-ki's work from the 1980s. With its precise, elegant composition in terms of color usage, it resembles the blue of the deep sea or the silent, mysterious starry firmament, full of mystery and imaginative power. A bright light flows out from the central portion of the canvas, painted with a level of detail that is intensely affecting, while also creating a relaxing, comforting effect. In the 1970s, Zao Wou-ki began once more to make use of techniques from traditional Chinese ink brush painting, a development that led a major transformation of his later work. As the art critic Jonathan Hay has described it, by the 1980s Zao's work had attained a "state of grace - a quality of gesture that is stripped of all hurriedness and creates a more powerful 'bone-structure,' a luminosity extending from infinite softness to enveloping darkness, a topography of form that opens itself to stillness and silence."

Zao Wou-ki's work in the 1980s is characterized by a trend towards the "spirituality of the void." This was an extremely challenging endeavor. As Zao himself has said, "Filling up the canvas is easy; painting 'emptiness' is hard." Zao consistently sought to create a kind of painting that seems to be empty. He knew that in traditional Chinese painting (for example when painting on high-quality xuan paper), emptiness can be achieved simply be leaving blank space, but that when painting in oils "emptiness" must be created slowly and steadily, and that the larger the canvas the more difficult this task is. What he is seeking to create in these paintings is a kind of "life space"; to be able to live in this space, you need to experience it. The virtual and the real must be linked together; in reality, they are just different aspects of the same life space. This linkage of the virtual and the real is particularly important in abstract painting, an issue to which Zao Wou-ki has attached great significance throughout his career. In "27.8.84," what seems like a deep ocean hides limitless mystery. In the way that the white light passes smoothly through the deep blue, Zao has taken the presentation of serenity and distance through the effective use of color, and the conceptual interpretation of the "spirituality of the void," to new heights of achievement. In this painting, we see the skill of a master painter displayed with the utmost effect.