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(Place cursor on pictures for caption)
Westerners often asked me this question:
"Why are the titles of your pictures all negative?
What are you denying?
What do all these negations mean?".
It is difficult for a Chinese, like me, to follow the "I think
therefore I am" of Descartes and so, all I can say is:
I do not think I am an artist-painter, therefore, I paint...
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This situation is normal, because
Chinese traditions have always been the opposite of those of the occident. The back of
Chinese books is the cover of Western books. Our writing goes from the top to the bottom,
the right-hand side towards the left in the vertical direction, with the exeption temples,
the monuments and gates where the legends are read from right to left in the horizontal
direction. Still, occidentalization has led the Chinese little by little to write
horizontally from left to right .
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Those
who contemplate my pictorial works have the worry of defining, of giving a title,
according to their Western conceptions and sensibilities.
But, not attaining Descartes' heights, "I think therefore I am not" and
I cannot define my pictures by names.
Nature has given me the possibility of expressing the TAO in painting, music, dance, calligraphy, drawing, architecture and
clothing creation...
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But the titles artist-philologist-professor-
designer twist me by the neck and betray the spirit of the TAO's Ancient Tradition.
I am not an artist-painter if what this means is to crawl and grovel
before the picture merchants.
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Picture captions
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"Goutte d'eau fleurie"
Acrylic on canvas 180 x 49,5 cm |
| 2/ |
"Confidences et interrogations de trois petites filles"
Oil on cardboard 46 x 65 cm (more than 10 sales refusals by the artist) |
| 3/ |
"Le Grandcarré sans angles"
Chinese ink on silk and paper, mounted on a vertical roll 173 x 65 cm (several rolls of
the same series have been bought by collecters and by the city of Paris) |
| 4/ |
"Selon le TAO TE KING, le haut n'est pas éclatant, le
bas n'est pas obscur"
Oil on canvas sold to Mr Jublou, Belgian collector, founder of the Banque des Arts |
| 5/ |
"Miroir sans figure, selon le TAO TE KING, figure sans
figure, forme sans forme"
Chinese ink on silk and paper, mounted on a horizontal roll, 63 x 182 cm |
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