SILENCE

​

LA PEINTURE CONTEMPORAINE CHINOISE

​

​

Salon du Dessin et de la Peinture à l'Eau  &  Salon des Artistes Français

– Grand Palais, Paris, November 23rd – 28th 2010 –

​

Strasbourg’s City Hall

– Strasbourg, Alsace, France, December 3rd – 30th 2010 –

​

Champagne de Cazanove’s Salons, Charles de Cazanove’s Champagne House

​

– Reims, Champagne-Ardenne, France, 7th June – 31st August 2011 –

​

​

- Bilingual French-English exhibition catalogue -

​

- Personal contribution : 16 texts for 16 artists + 1 opening text -

Pages 22 to 25, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56 & 58

+ p.5 : for another author, a text established from two of his past articles

​

- Personal translation & adaptations -

ISBN : 978-2-9535968-1-6

​

​

——

​

​

- OPENING TEXT -

(cat. pp.22-25)

​

In the depths of the most common aspects resides the extraordinary,

And to have this constantly in mind

Already leads us to have an inkling of the extra-ordinary fact

That one of the most common, the most elementary of terms

Arouses the most intra extraordinary of the effects

When at last we are about to

Undertake to catch a fleeting glimpse of this without epithet.

 

Then, to understand the nuance of the definite nature

Of an indefinite article, the nuance of the undefinition

Of a defined article appears as being within our reach.

 

But who really could not weary

Of what one would make indefinitely a sales pitch to him

Without making him the proposal of the experience…

 

And this is precisely what these artists propose us to live,

The experience ;

And what’s more the Silence experience.

 

 

The Silence experience…

Experience

 

From the depths, the choir of things,

Straight from the emergency entry of significance,

From the place where beyond the rift of supposition’s biases

All is inter-belonging…

Silence

Constantly redefining itself

Places itself within our reach

Puts itself at our inconstant disposal

So that we may understand

Its condition that is devoid of nuances :

Silence

 

 

 

Thus, hereby

Artists of intercivilizational scope

Are proposing to us that in their creations we may draw,

As archaeologists learning from both entire and fragmentary truths

A truth through its reconstruction.

 

Thus, so that we may understand the brilliance of the elementary condition

Silence

It falls to us not to be content with its leftovers

But to appreciate the true worth

Of its emanations.

Thus, so that we may reach

One of the Whole’s primates

We are throwing ourselves into the exploration of infinite possibilities.

 

Not confronted with but in private,

It is our duty not to look for solace, by going

First to confront to the pediment

Of our elementary miscomprehension of the elementary.

 

Brisk or nonchalant,

Silence must not set its pace to fit our clock,

It is omnipresent

And comes to he who hears

And, should the occasion arise, won’t stop astonishing us,

Catching us in the act,

Suspending us in proper time and place

In depth, space and time.

 

It is omnipresent.

 

 

So that at last we would no more arrogate

The deviation from the primacy of the right to incomprehension

But so that we would abrogate the false faith in a

Precipice-frontispiece

By the legitimate right to miscomprehension

As a stop on the way to comprehension, that is paved with traps,

Let’s prick up our ears

For the manifestations of silence do not doze.

In as many emanations as there are Possibles…

There, and above all here, present.

 

 

Silence can insufflate vertigo ;

Silence, vertigo’s apprehension.

So let’s agree, brisk and nonchalant,

On the pace of a step moulded in moderation.

May one of the most laudable qualities – curiosity –

Not time and time again rally to one of the most detestable

Of ours faults: the establishment of universal truths

Based on the excessive manifestation of subjectivity.

 

How many artists are we indebted to…

How many remain on the verge of comprehension…

 

Just as it had been possible for us to understand the infinite enough

To name and write it,

Let’s assume our perfectible condition

And let’s cross these antiquated boundaries that have no more raison d’être.

 

 

Everywhere, silence.

In every silence, a thousand places, a thousand leagues.

 

Here with us, bears witness to this

The multiplicity of the hues of silence’s spectrum

That, through the materialization of the immaterial

Proposes us to live,

By taking some of the ways of an initiatory journey,

The experience of Silence’s whole

Through the impregnation in this "Silence" whole.

 

 

May from these silence emanations, from this abundance of nuances,

In their turn emerge around nuances in abundance.

May not a silence submerge us any more.

May the polyphony of aesthetics succeed to the poliorcetics

 

 

And as the words go rarefying, essentializing itselves,

Let’s contemplate, before us to return to Silence,

The fact that here by this exhibition of artists of a universal scope

We have been, are, and perpetually will be

Initiated

​

​

——

​

​

- 16 ARTISTS - 16 TEXTS -

 (cat. pp. 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58) 

​

CHEN Jianping

No.109

 

Evident and undefinable, discreet, monumental,

endowed with symbols in mutation, with constantly evolving signs,

an intercivilizational stone, a salient hologram, landmark of all the nuances of a time immemorial,

and of temporality converging to an infinity of identical and unique points.

Mutation, becoming, simultaneity, the spark in which all temporality both resides and is conjugated

in accordance with the timeless modality of silence’s continual bright evidence.

​

Through the omnipresence of a cornerstone, the silence of the breath of the Whole’s spark

​

​

GENG Jinqxin

New building

  

Here, the uniqueness of the constancy of the understanding of standardization.

Here, the idea of the apparent simplicity of such an establishment is fading away.

A descent into the bottom of a mirror’s frontal surface… and yet ovality takes first place.

Beyond the systematization of the insipid… discretion’s pertinence.

A silent negotiation’s ambitious invitation… Humanity takes first place.

​

To decline a silence so that other ones may draw on it and may be declined

​

 

HE Canbo

Maya 04

 

No uncertainty, no certainty but the one emanating from the certainty that there is no certainty…

without which the only one would be that there is only uncertainty.

Between silence and Silence, a suspension point, a point in suspension. Emanation.

The space in between is not to be in two but being the two.

Being-in-becoming is already to become, is to be already.

​

As the hand that keeps quiet and listens to the water it meets, what cannot be seized is palpable

​

​

HE Weiming

Attente (Waiting)

 

Internal and external are in symbiosis.

Silences unite in one silence, times in one time, wholes in one whole.

The present waiting is not a slur on the osmosis but a scansion from which arises a silence,

immaterial and salient. A unison.

When the waiting is not a puncture but the punctuation,

it is not an existential parenthesis but a median fermata, radiant with the boiling sky.

​

When waiting is tending to reach the unison

​

​

LI Tingting

Shoes 

 

The elegance of a keen awareness that, again, exempts us from the hemlock of a false latency.

Delight, the wonder to feel our smile’s features deepening in this way

as the ravishment of the opening takes shape.

Everlasting youth spreads around the love to put one’s awakening’s rays on.

Thus on our faces the smile of this ageless youth which through ages was notably the privilege of wise men.

​

The silence of an enchanting smile… the silence of enchanted smiles

​

​

LI Zhuo

Untitled

 

On the way towards a vista of possibilities, to give oneself a moment in order to be

in a position to entirely understand the instant where we are situated…

…so that in the depths of things the choir of things could immediately sentence the solitude of finiteness.

No more silences. The emergence of sight. The meeting with silence.

​

From the rifts of yesteryear… the straight line out of the mirage, the senses’ bend, silence’s shore

​

​

LIU Bochi

Don’t Ask Me

 

An individuality secluded in an imperative made of frailty,

in an incisive silence that she spreads before further snuggling up in it.

The reference to the appearance’s drop in level of orality’s impossibility.

The heightened sudden awareness of the will of intersubjectivity.

Opening on the instinctive will of humanity.

Hence there is no absolute negation of the eventuality.

Hence, the silence of a song is not the absence of a field.

​

When hushing up and being silent is suddenly and singularly to emanate

from one’s spatio-temporality

​

​

LIU Xining

Sailing a Boat on the Dry Land

 

To apprehend a never dozing colossus is not an easy task.

To hollow out reprehensible connotation’s biased paths is the attestation of the agility of a swift mind

which knew how not to be press-ganged.

To present to the perceptive gripping the nature of whatsoever it may be

without eluding it but elucidating it is a tour de force.

The true semblance of the obvious beyond the pretence of the obvious.

Beyond silences… without apprehension, the silence of elocution.

​

Understanding the nature of any thing also lies in the silence of its nudity, in the nudity of silence

​

​

NING Zhuotao

Aube (Dawn) 

 

It remains disconcerting to note how much art can be in a position to make us understand,

and this before any analysis of our perceptions and sympathies,

the evidence itself that we are living something entirely asserted entirely in-becoming.

The dawn of the bodily eye takes effect even before the understanding’s flashing activation which,

already in a zenith, lives the perpetual becoming’s assurance.

Dawn, Junction-impulse of the silences.

​

The bright, elusive and singular nodality of the established assurance of a perpetual evolution

​

​

SU Shangzhou

Supreme…Saint Mountain

 

A timeless presence, a timeless salience.

The serenity of a bright evidence, the recurrence of uniqueness,

the fragrance of the everlasting, the essence of eternity.

The resonance of Silence.

The sublime is also frightening… the supreme is also solemn.

The revealed silence’s frontal depth is vertiginous and restores peace of mind.

​

The shock of the understanding of the undefinable

​

​

SUN Yi

Liang ge ren

  

From the breather during which the spirit likes to wander, a very specific silence emanates.

And the organic likes taking part in the dialogue,

joining in its own dilution and then harvesting the dowser’s manna.

Philologists, let’s define the terms of an indefinite truce which, albeit brief,

will bring us back to the source more than many a night.

​

To share the inherent vulnerability of an open silence bubble

​

 

WANG Liming

Choc (Shock)

 

Neither order nor disorder in this established fact

in all sides of which lies a dynamism the boiling of which observes us.

Here prevails the latent breath of what had been brewed in the light of the spotlights

and feigned to sink, scattered, into oblivion.

One of the meanings of what seemed, for a while, to have lost some of its meaningfulness.

The diffused aura of that which flowers in oblivion.

Saturated with accumulated silences, a stave of silences, one of silence’s staves.

​

The profusion of a silence brewed with an oblivion sowed in unison-light

​

​

WU Xuelian

Playground No.4

 

The introspection, the inspection, the dispersion of almost the entire acception of a common place,

the common sense revealed in the light of its quasi dilution, a light revealed by its diffuse essentialization. The erasure of duplicity toward the advent of the difficulty which is not to conceive in it any austerity

but commonly to see the infallible uniqueness of meaning’s dimensionality.

The unutterable dexterity of an impassive and translucent flat tinted area of silence

born of a trans-lucid individuality.

​

When the inwardness gathers the silence of essentialization, the pitfall of sanitization is avoided

​

​

XUE Junning

Xiao Yun

  

Whether his gaze settles on modern objects or on figures belonging to a fuller continuity,

Xue Junning has the knack, not of combining but of generating in a same action

timelessness and immediacy through saliently weightless forms.

Point and linearity, feeling, plastic and appeasing blending.

The poetry of the prose that hops while levitating. A peaceful smile.

​

Happy serenity; the detachment that proposes; silence is within our reach

​

 

YAO Jihong

Paysage urbain II (panneau de droite) - Cityscape II (right panel)

 

To take the time to step back and look at things is to undertake a flash-forward on the way to signification, a connection within which silence encompasses modernity’s trail of interferences…

and the city entity re-appears.

From restlessness, dynamism; from noise, ‘bruitism’ (noise-ism);

from chrominance, chromatism; from immersion, altitude;

from the multitude’s swarming, unity’s courses.

From diseases, the agency of words’ silence.

​

To inhale hindsight’s silence…

in order to no longer exhale in silence under the influence of the step back

​

​

ZHAO Biqin

Lady

 

A subtle affirmation of diversities united.

Firm chromatisms, expressions to an expression, feelings towards a feeling…

This whole is conflated to assure us that entire silences are presenting themselves to us,

joining their voices to lead us to deeply question ourselves without upsetting us.

Since from this conflation individualities emanate, we are not intimidated,

and we are now sharing the intimate silence of a first contact. In suspension.

​

The sweetness of an encounter through gazes and postures,

the silence of which takes us eloquently aback

​

——

​

​