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the Chinese understood how to use silk to make magnificent fabrics. So beautiful and colorful. And that technique required tremendous patience.
Tell us about patience, please.
Patience is the keyword when we talk about ancient jade or silk. Today, we have simply lost our patience. The modern world is trying to become faster and more efficient. It runs counter to patience.
Time does not exist. It only exists in how we narrate it. It exists when we use an artwork to narrate it, or in the creation of fabric, or the polishing of a piece of jade. This is a qualitiy that does not commonly exist in a contemporary art practice.
Because it is craft, also, which disappears, in a way. Because of a lack of patience?
Of course. And a lack of patience leads to a different understanding of human life itself because you don’t see a continuity of life. You think life begins and ends with you.
Let’s speak about the crafts. I don’t know if you know the work of my friend, Monir Sharoudy Farmanfarmaian. She’s an Iranian artist, now ninety-eight years old and she has been working with Iranian craft for many, many years. She of course says that craft is also dying out. Our age of extinction is not only an extinction of species, including the potential demise or extinction of our own species, but there are also languages and crafts disappearing. In a way, I think your collections are also showing that to us.
Craft is a language. So when craft disappears, when our hands can no longer create, that means that we cannot learn from our hands anymore. That is tragic. My students don’t use their hands. They don’t know how to draw; they don’t know how to properly write a sentence.
That’s why I use my Instagram to show the hand writing or drawing.
You’re right. People don’t use their hands anymore and then they become retarded. Humans become intelligent because our hands are teaching our brains. Our brains do not teach our hands.
We have talked about the jade collection and the textile collection. Should we also include the furniture collection? You use some of your furniture for your sculpture, but you keep some in your collection, don’t you?
My furniture collection is really an attempt to understand the social behavior of the society.
It is perhaps unremarkable to see one unique piece, but it is amazing to me to see a standard understanding of certain aesthetics on a societal level. For instance, the furniture made in the emperor’s court was created with a high aesthetic level, skill, and at great expense. But in very remote areas, in a poor village with no information, they’re creating almost the same thing, except with cheaper materials.
In the countryside?
Yes, in the countryside, in places that have no light at nighttime. It fascinates me to see how a society can create things with a similar aesthetic understanding even when they belong to very different social classes. That is amazing!
We always think art happens in cities, but a lot of these things come from rural areas, from the countryside. And what you say is very important, because we don’t know anything now about the countryside. This is a kind of blind spot.
We misinterpret the countryside. We always think that civilization goes in one direction, from the countryside to the city, with urbanization. Actually, most of the profit goes to a very small amount of capitalist corporations and that is a complete misinterpretation of our common humanity. What makes our urban life sustainable belongs to the countryside. Air, earth, water, seed cultivation, the seasons, all these things from the countryside have to be preserved.
You’re right. We talked about the jade collection, the textile collection, and the furniture collection. Are there any other collections?
The most important collection is about humanity, about who we are, why we are here, why we are still making things, and why we still communicate. Why do we have to do twenty-one interviews and then another seventy-nine in the future if our life is long enough? Are our passion and our words enough to cope with this situation? Very often we find out that our vocabulary is not enough. We have to create new vocabularies.
I can do so many interviews with you because you are always doing something different.
It’s true. Every time I see you, I’m someone new. I’m not the old me anymore.
That is why it is so exciting to do many interviews. They’re always very different.
All my effort is put into trying to have you still pay attention to me; that you are still interested in doing another interview. Next time, maybe we will talk about films. I am making four or five new films.
Yes, we will do a long film interview!
Getting back to this issue of Cahiers d’Art, I wanted to talk about the archives. As you know, when we decided to revive Cahiers d’Art, and give it a new life, the idea was to also use this amazing history the magazine has, and to reproduce in each new issue a couple of images from the Cahiers d’Art archives. I wanted to ask you to tell us about the three archives that we have selected for this issue.
On the one hand, we have a Chinese sculpture, which comes from a text by George-Henri Rivière. It is a sculpture donated by Mr. David Weill to the Louvre, and it is certainly, without a doubt, one of the great masterpieces of Chinese art outside China. This Buddha now belongs to the collections of the Musée national des arts asiatiques Guimet in Paris.
It’s amazing. It’s a northern Wei dynasty-style Buddha. It dates from the fifth century. This is the earliest period when people in China began to create sculptures bearing the likeness of humans. Not long before was the eastern Han dynasty when the first Buddhist images came from India. Either the craftsman learned there, or had come to China, to begin producing figurative sculptures. Figurative sculptures never really existed because they had a very different understanding of the relationship between humans and nature. But then suddenly the religion of Buddhism was introduced. You can see that this Buddha doesn’t look like Indian Buddhas. He is less dramatic or sexy. See his face and the gesture of his hands. This is a typical Chinese gesture. Very calm.
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