A kind of conversation, On Otherness and Congruence
Conversation between Bart De Baere, Fei Dawei and Jean-Marie Simonet
Paris, January 7, 2004
Bart De Baere: To me, the most fascinating aspect with regard to this project lies neither in the
contemporary (Chinese) art that will be exhibited, nor in the ancient (Chinese) art, but in
relationships. The fact that a work by Jan Van Eyck dating from the 15th century is shown side
by side with a traditional Chinese landscape painting from the 14th century by Wang Zhenpeng,
the mere possibility of having both these works together in one space I consider fascinating.
What is more, this coexistence is even plausible to me. I think it is essential to discover a kind of
normality in it. I would like to know your vision of how our Western image of these two realities
has been formed. Do you have any experience as far as this question is concerned?
Jean-Marie Simonet: Sinologists have developed the concept of the ‘otherness’ of Chinese
civilization. They have described it as a fundamental other. This means that there are no common
points that could be compared. The two traditions are seen as two universes that are founded on
fundamentally different concepts. In other words, what is not comparable cannot be compared.
Bart De Baere: Do you agree?
Fei Dawei: Exactly. It is nearly impossible to make evident, to translate the fundamental concepts
of Chinese thought or aesthetics into a Western language: for example, you would need a book to
explain yun, qi, or shen1. There is no corresponding word.
Bart De Baere: The West has been very strong in developing the concept of otherness. Ethnology
is based on it. It enhances a model of Western dominance. I like the subtitle of Bruno Latour's
book Nous n’avons jamais été modernes (We have never been modern), which is: Essai
d’anthropologie symétrique (Essay in symmetrical anthropology). The concept of otherness may
exclude the other. You can cultivate it, even on a level of individuals. I will never be able to
understand you, and I cannot communicate what I feel now, not even in a book. Of course, you
can agree with the concept of the other as something fundamental, which is also the difference
between this bottle of water and me, between the moon and us.
Jean-Marie Simonet: I think this is not disturbing; you can be bi-cultural, even multi-cultural.
Bart De Baere: Being somewhere in-between the moon and us.
Jean-Marie Simonet: Recently, I had lunch with the Chinese cultural attaché in Belgium, and
after a while he said to me: "Simonet, you are really Chinese." I am as much Chinese as I am still
Belgian, as I am what I am. To know the other well, one first has to be oneself. How could I be
more Chinese than a Chinese? Because I am sometimes concerned with things that contemporary
Chinese are not concerned with any more. I have worked in a museum for twenty years, I have
lived in China for a long time, and my behaviour and my attitude towards reality are therefore
These are fundamental principles of Chinese painting theory, approximating respectively “resonance” (yun),
“material force” (qi), and “spirit” (shen). Here in the translation by Lin Shuen-fu, cited from: Lin Shuen-fu, “Chiang
K’uei’s Treatises” in: Bush/ Murck (eds.), Theories of the Arts in China, Princeton University Press, 1983: pp.293314.
1
sometimes closer to traditional Chinese culture than that of many contemporary Chinese people.
Sometimes, when I meet Chinese people and speak to them in Chinese, they will not understand
me immediately. They think I am so different from them that they first have to accept the idea
that someone who is not Chinese can speak their language.
Bart De Baere: Can you say something more about the duality of your personality?
Jean-Marie Simonet: The duality of my personality, as you call it, allows me to critically
approach both my own culture and Chinese culture in a way the Chinese do not. In order to know
one’s own culture, in order to know any culture it is essential to have a critical and relativist point
of view.
Bart De Baere: Why did you choose to deal with an ancient culture?
Jean-Marie Simonet: It started with an interest and this means I had a scholarly approach. There
are always so many new things to learn. Knowledge of course is always limited, but the more one
knows, the more one wants to know. This is endless. I was fascinated and worked hard. People in
the West often think of China as mysterious. This is nonsense. Behind all this is knowledge,
which is accessible to everybody. All depends on your efforts. Knowledge means science.
One starts with studying and practising, and then advances further and further. What I like about
Chinese is that I easily forget that I am studying. It is like being carried by a wave.
Bart De Baere: I would like to come back to the juxtaposition of the painting by Van Eyck and
that by Wang Zhenpeng. It is a kind of conversation, and I do not think that I am not able to
understand this landscape painting by Wang Zhenpeng. In other words, I do not think that I
understand it less than Van Eyck’s painting.
Jean-Marie Simonet: Yet the subject of both works is very different. The mental universe of Van
Eyck is religious. The interest in reality, however, evident in the figures or the architecture he
painted, is motivated by a visual approach to reality. It is both perception and line that relate the
Van Eyck with Wang Zhenpeng’s description of the landscape. I think this affinity is purely
visual. The intellectual aspect behind it, each artist’s quest, is fundamentally different. It is the
perception of reality that introduces an affinity between the perfection of the depiction by Van
Eyck and that by Wang Zhenpeng. Another similarity between the works is a kind of
translucence evident in Van Eyck’s drawing, as well as in Wang Zhenpeng’s monochromatic and
linear painting style. The juxtaposition of the two works seems very plausible to me. On the other
hand, the combination of the representation of a crucifixion with that of Chinese saints, for
example the "Eighteen Luohan" – a kind of eccentric, weird looking hermit – which has been
proposed by one of the museum’s officials, seemed unacceptable, even outrageous to me. In
Chinese religious culture the martyr is absent. Therefore I juxtaposed the crucifixion with
Chinese landscape paintings. In Chinese culture the spiritual universe is Nature, the cosmos
embodied in the landscape. This is how I integrated Chinese paintings into an occidental
museum.
Bart De Baere: As far as I know, in traditional Chinese culture, art is not important but the
individual is. Art is only a tool for the individual. For Belgian artists such is too kitsch an
approach. Imagine, if Van Eyck and Wang Zhenpeng had met, both being artists concerned with
perception, where would they have been able to find an interest in each other, an affinity with one
another?
Jean-Marie Simonet: I would again say: perception, the visuality of our world.
Bart De Baere: Would they have been able to discuss this?
Jean-Marie Simonet: I think so.
Bart De Baere: Where do you see similarities, where differences?
Jean-Marie Simonet: I see similarities in the perfection of the line, the brush. The line might have
been something supreme to them. I think people like Van Eyck were fascinated by the research of
something at the tip of their brush. This was the same for the great Chinese painters.
Fei Dawei: I would like to recount the first encounter of Chinese literati with a Western painting
in the 18th century. The literati were shocked. The trace of the brush (bifa), essential to traditional
Chinese painting, was not visible at all. In the occidental tradition it is the trompe l’oeil, space,
perspective, and chiaroscuro that are important. The eyes that look at a painting are conditioned
by the culture they belong to. The literati were not used to looking at this kind of painting and
consequently held it in very low esteem.
Jean-Marie Simonet: The literati thought it was well done, but for them it simply was not painting
because the calligraphic stroke was missing. Yet, what accidentally relates Van Eyck and Wang
Zhenpeng is the emphasis on the line, a linear (I mean non-modulated) stroke. The line of Van
Eyck and Wang Zhenpeng are actually very similar. This is curious. In the history of Chinese
painting Wang belongs to the category of the so-called boundary painting with ruled and
measured outlines (jiehua).2
Bart De Baere: This means, for the literati to consider a painting a painting, the calligraphic line
was indispensable. But they could have found this kind of line also in the occidental tradition, for
example in Rembrandt’s works.
Jean-Marie Simonet: Yes, of course, in this respect, Rembrandt’s drawings are very close to the
Chinese tradition.
Fei Dawei: One’s eyes are conditioned by one’s culture. But the gaze can develop. The habits of
appreciating a work of art, the eyes, change with the time. The eyes of a Chinese of the 18th
century are different from those of a contemporary Chinese.
Bart De Baere: This is comparable to the reception of Japanese art in Europe in the late 19th, early
20th century.
Fei Dawei: The gaze develops with the knowledge and the understanding of the other, foreign
culture. The great Western artists, even if they do not know anything about Chinese art, will still
2
Jiehua literally means boundary painting and denotes a painting with ruled and measured outlines. Used mainly in
architectural representation.
recognize great Chinese calligraphy immediately. But for a European painter of the 19th century
this would certainly have been difficult.
Jean-Marie Simonet: To come back to the Chinese literati of the 18th century, who considered
Western paintings lacking any trace of calligraphic line to not qualify as painting, I think their
judgment was not based on their perception but on a cultural prejudice. For them, Wang
Zhenpeng’s boundary paintings were not art either, but were handicraft instead. He was a painter
at the Mongol court. The Mongols, who were not Chinese, recruited many artisans, as they did
not have the cultural and aesthetic prejudices of the Chinese literati. I think we have to
distinguish between perception and aesthetic prejudice.
Bart De Baere: In China today we have this kind of mixture of many cultural traditions and
influences. Traditional Chinese art for me seems to be very light and there is a lot of energy in it.
Could one make a metaphorical comparison between traditional and contemporary Chinese
culture?
Fei Dawei: I think Chinese tradition is carrying on, maybe less in its formal expressions but more
in its concepts. The Chinese language that, through its difference from Western languages, can
engender a very different way of thinking, another kind of logic, plays a vital role here. This is
very important for contemporary Chinese art that is inspired by this different way of thinking. In
China a work of art is often explained not through the concepts it represents but through the
attitude it articulates. In Chinese the word "to be" expresses a different concept than the Western
equivalent. In Chinese the meaning of the word is less restricted: something can be one thing but
simultaneously also many other things. But it is also very dangerous to approach our subject like
this, as we are looking for an opening and not a closure of Chinese culture.
Martina Köppel-Yang: Chinese thought was very important for the Western modernist
movement. And interestingly young Chinese artists of the 1980s rediscovered their tradition
through the reception of Western works that at some point had absorbed Eastern concepts. We
have here a kind of double reflection. Chinese artists of the mid-1980s, for example, rediscovered
chan (zen) through the reception of John Cage whose work is deeply impregnated by chan.
Huang Yongping, for example, related chan to Dada, stating that " chan is Dada, and Dada is
chan." In the mid-1980s this was a scandal. To come back here to the notion of translation, I do
not think that a translation of other, foreign concepts is impossible. But no translation can be
congruent with the original. Precisely in this gap lies the possibility of creation.
Fei Dawei: What is interesting is that through the double reflection Chinese artists came to
another understanding and interpretation of their own tradition, different again from that of John
Cage. Their reinterpretation was also situated within another context, that of socialist China and
of socialist realism, which was very provocative in the 1980s. Here Chinese tradition had become
the engine of a revolt. It was not only Western contemporary art that had driven the Chinese
avant-garde of the 1980s but also traditional Chinese concepts, such as chan buddhism and
daoism. Chinese traditional thought here had become part of a subversive trend. It can be easily
related to Wittgenstein’s philosophy of "transcendental lingualism," the latter being the
conviction that the inner structure of reality is evident in language, but cannot be described
through language. It made Chinese artists go against logic, to choose an anti-logic in their way of
thinking: “Fanzhe, daozhe dong”, a dictum by Laozi meaning "moving into the opposite
direction". This relates to the movement of the Dao and also indicates a way of unconventional,
non-linear thinking.
Martina Köppel-Yang: Which is going against the linearity of the socialist positivist ideology.
Fei Dawei: This all is part of the resources of the Chinese avant-garde.
Jean-Marie Simonet: This dictum by Laozi somehow is the antidote of dogmatism.
Transcription by Martina Köppel-Yang