BOOK REVIEWS

He Qing, Images du Silence: Pensée et art chinois

As his biographical note on the back cover states, He Qing's works fall into the present-day problematic of cultural resistance to the “sham universalism” imposed by the West. His avowed aim is to challenge or correct certain common representations about Chinese painting: the importance of “movement”, the omnipresence of nature and especially the labels of “Romantic”, “individualist” or “expressionist” applied to certain works, the relevance of which he contests. All these forms of appropriation of Chinese art seem to him to leave out the philosophical substratum that constitutes its core, and that can be summarised in the concept of “silence”, the culmination of a process of oblivion of the self. The author begins therefore by recalling the cardinal role of “silence” in Chinese philosophy, whether this be Confucian, Taoist or Buddhist, then in Chinese aesthetic thought, before going on to examine its concrete translation in poetry (Tao Yuanming, Xie Lingyun, Wang Wei, Meng Haoran, etc.) and painting (Huang Gongwang, Ni Zan, Wu Zhen, Wang Meng and Fang Congyi). This presentation of Chinese thought is not, however, very new: the interest of He Qing's study lies less in the notions discussed (the dialectic of rest and movement, the control over emotions, insipidity, eremitism, than in the many quotations and references to the corresponding Chinese terms, some of which are given directly in the text, the others in a glossary to be found at the end of the work. Chapter VII, in particular, casts useful light on 12 aesthetic notions that are often difficult to translate (“distant”, “limpid”, “idle”, “lonely”). In his desire to be demonstrative, the work unfortunately at times lacks subtlety. A certain condescension can be felt towards the West, of being incapable of perceiving the spiritual dimension beyond matter and “individualist passions”. The work presents a simplistic vision of the West, and is not devoid either of clichés about Chinese art: everything that is not in the great tradition of scholarly landscape painting is regarded as cottage industry stuff or simply crass. The escapist dimension of Chinese eremitism is never taken into account and the artists, be they painters or poets, seem to live spontaneously in an ethereal world, as if their works had never expressed the slightest hint of passion or despair. This happens to such an extent that one comes to wonder whether, in wishing to give his subject its full philosophical dignity, supposedly threatened by the gaze of the West, the writer does not himself comfort a conventional and quasi-mythical image of Chinese serenity.

Translated from the French original by Peter Brown