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Yes, it has a very calm presence, and it’s very different from Greek heritage. If you look at Greek antiquity from the same time, it is like “eye candy.” As if the statue were saying, “Here I am, I want you to see me.” This Chinese sculpture is not “eye candy.”
No, it is much calmer. It’s not trying to make a strong impression, or to impose itself. Its presence is very soft and subtle.
It’s also interesting that it comes from a nomadic culture. The Tungusic people were nomadic people coming from what is today Mongolia and Northern China. We talk a lot about nomads in the twenty-first century and I find it interesting that this amazing masterpiece came from the nomads.
Yes, of course.
The second Cahiers d’Art archive that we are presenting is a text by George Salles, curator at the Louvre, about Chinese paintings from the collection of Baron Kawasaki. These paintings were actually unpublished in Europe. It was Cahiers d’Art that published them for the first time, in 1927, and they are amazing pictures of animals, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and landscapes. Can you tell us a little bit about these Chinese paintings?
These paintings are from the Song and Yuan dynasties. Chinese painting had probably its highest form in the Song dynasty, around 1,000 years ago. Few of these paintings remain because they were very fragile. They are just ink painted on silk.
These paintings are real masterpieces. They perfectly reflect the Chinese inner world, the connection to nature. The highest standard for a Chinese scholar was to become a part of nature, to disappear, or to invite nature into the human heart. You can see this kind of beauty in these paintings. Painting nature is like poetry, always surreal. It is never a copy of nature, but a copy of the artist’s inner world. The interpretation is everything. The Song is probably the dynasty that carried the highest aesthetic values. But the Yuan dynasty was a very creative period too.
Why did Chinese painting peak with the Song and Yuan dynasties? What were the conditions in which they flourished?
Chinese history is always going back and forth. Some dynasties are under foreign influence and then we go back to our so-called Chinese roots. Before the Song dynasty, the Tang dynasty was heavily influenced by Persia. After the Song came the Yuan, strong invaders from Mongolia. After the Yuan came the Ming, which was a return to this Chineseness. So Chinese history is a succession of invasions up until today. In the twentieth century we have been invaded twice. First by Karl Marx, whose ideas about social change have been used in a very damaging way, bringing communism and a lot of violence. Then by a second idea coming from the West—capitalism—which brought the totalitarian capitalist state.
We have a third archive text presenting amazing archaic Chinese bronzes. This text was published in Cahiers d’Art in 1927 by Alfred Salmony, from the East Asia museum in Cologne. Why are these bronzes so important?
These bronzes are some of the most important pieces of ancient Chinese art. They come from the late Shang and early Zhou dynasties (twelfth-eleventh century BCE).
People wouldn’t believe that they are so old, because they look very new. Over time these objects develop a patina that make them more beautiful.
The bronzes from the Shang dynasty are amazing. The casting technology at that time was superior to that of any other civilization in the world. You cannot compare it with any other in the world. No parallel culture in history ever reached such a level of perfection in casting, molding, motifs, or sculpting. These objects have a ceremonial dimension, but at the same time they have a practical use such as for cooking or for drinking wine. Why would a king have asked for such a particular drinking cup? Today, all the furniture and objects are sort of ‘IKEA standard.’ We don’t have fancy cups anymore! Who are the kings that developed this tradition? How could this become a tradition? You could even imagine that this kind of casting had been brought to humankind by someone from outer space! But that was the highest form for those emperors from that time.
As you said before, if you look at all these old Chinese works, they are not copies of nature. They are like poetry.
For me, the sense of poetry itself, or of artworks like these Song paintings, or these archaic Shang dynasty bronzes, are not reflections of our human nature, but rather an extension of our nature to an extreme condition. The artisans have the ego and ability to cope with these materials to develop the highest, finest possibilities. That is poetic. Without that, we would never have known that our minds could be as peaceful as a Song dynasty painting. We would never have understood that we could so harmoniously relate to the outside world. If you look at the Shang bronzes, you cannot believe our hearts can even cope; to create something so loud and wild, but also with such rationality and order.
You told me in an interview some years ago, “Poetry is the highest form of human language.”
Yes, because poetry makes us understand who we are.
And you also said to me, “I believe that poetry keeps the mind at an earlier stage of rationality. It brings us back to a pure sensation of contact with our feelings. It brings us back to the innocent stage where imagination and language can be extremely vulnerable and, at the same time, extremely penetrating.”
Everything is true in that sentence. Whatever I said, it is true, of course! But it is a young language, actually. And language is limited. If you use the old language, you always limit yourself.
So, we can’t really define poetry?
Once we define it, it is not poetry anymore.
Can you tell us about your favorite poets?
I don’t know very much about poetry, but I can tell you about the poets that I read with my father, like the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren. My father translated Verhaeren into Chinese. Maybe you could publish his translations?
That sounds great. We would like that.
Verhaeren was a poet that really described his country and his people in a naturalistic way. He wrote about the capital, the expansion of cities, and about the farms and the disappearance of rural areas. He
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