In the classical world, everything has a limit: the horizon. All humanity owes its gratitude to the Italians for inventing this geometric perspective - even if it can be "atmospheric" with the great Leonardo da Vinci. And this horizon toward which everything converges, without any possible escape - even if, ironically, the central point is called the "vanishing point" - implies all the apparent visibility of this physical world in which we live. When Wang Yancheng, the one I have named "the magician able to remove the horizon", represents the world, he does not limit himself to a space in front of him, in which he finds himself, sitting, standing, or moving. He does not contemplate the horizon, he does not approach a horizon. What interests him is not the near or the far. He wants to express all his perceptions of this world. The naked world.
And in front of this series of works that depict the naked world, by the great chance of circumstances, will be one of the greatest nudes in the world, David, by Michelangelo. In the three-dimensionality of the sculpture, with the air that caresses this half-millennial statue, an artist coming from a country with a civilization several thousand years old, offers visitors from all over the world all the freshness of his vision. This artist has been able, and this is no small feat, to traverse in forty years what the West took centuries to cover, just like his country of origin, mysterious and open, ancient and dynamic, disconcerting and yet just as obvious.
Wang Yancheng's paintings in dialogue with David. A contemporary Chinese artist surround-ed by the great classics of Italy and even the entire West, the concept may be surprising. And yet. For more than thirty years, I have followed the career of this Chinese man like no other - should we remind or teach our Italian friends that there are more than one hundred million Wangs in China, almost twice the Italian population? - there is a sort of invisible thread that leads him toward this confrontation, or rather this face-to-face.
He rejected the figurative very early on. The body. Nudes. In classical Chinese art, "the nude is impossible," says François Jullien, the philosopher who drew inspiration from China to develop a very personal modern aesthetic. Impossible, but perhaps also unnecessary. The Chinese considered very early on that the body is never isolated. Either it is never truly naked, or it is naked at the same time as other things, as the rest of the world. It is naked at the same time as the world. No more naked than a rock. He quickly understood Zao Wou-Ki, an artist who confronted all modern Western art to rediscover the Chinese cosmic breath. Just like Zao Wou-Ki, who in no way denies all those who guided him in this Chinese rediscovery by giving his paintings explicit titles of "homages" to such and such a master of modern Western art (Matisse, Monet, etc.), Wang Yancheng has kept the greatest modern lesson that he learned in the West: color.
Although the importance of ink, black and white, in classical Chinese painting is emphasized, color remains a modern challenge that few painters have been able to meet, especially with oil painting. It required an education that departed from tradition. Just like those musicians whose extraordinary fingering is astonishing, the Chinese were able to quickly master the technical aspects of a Western art of painting. But few were able to infuse it with a Chinese spirit. A confident lyricism, expressed through oil paints that border on watercolor or gouache, has long made Wang Yancheng's reputation. Some even consider him the devoted follower of Zao Wou-Ki.
As we look at recent paintings by Wang Yancheng, they represent a kind of "break" from the works with which we are already familiar. Yes, we are faced with something so different at first glance. This "break", or new trend, took place recently with the very successful exhibition held in Japan, in a space as classic as Galleria dell'Accademia, namely the National Museum of Tokyo. And it is above all in such a place where the magic fully works. Wang Yancheng's paintings, often immense in size, "borderless," so to speak, are "framed" by a place of pure classicism, radiating in a freedom that the place contains and reinforces, like powerful waves in dikes. And these dikes are none other than history itself, or the entire history of art.
We can expect a similar effect when his new paintings are exhibited at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. But we can also expect something else. For this is Italy. That is, the very source of that classicism that has conquered the greatest institutions of visual arts education, even in China, up to this generation of artists that includes Wang Yancheng.
These vast expanses of emptiness are not vacant, but transparent. Transparency is not void. Transparency is Breath. Pure Air. It envelops us and nourishes us, just like air. Just like the air that surrounds and caresses the eternal David. And just as the emptiness that surrounds David allows us to glimpse the whole of man concentrated in a statue, transparency fully immerses us in the world concentrated in its quintessence.
It is with that ambient, imbibing, nourishing emptiness that the world appears in all its sensory, superb materiality. It presents itself to our five senses, reminding us that we are in the world, and in harmony with it. The world in all its nakedness, mixed with residues, traces left after man's physical struggles with the world. With traces of hand-to-hand combat with the world. Yes, the world is to be confronted like Michelangelo's David preparing to do so, like an immense obstacle, over which victory is not given in advance; but the world can also become transparent, just as after Picasso's struggle with objects: when an object is truly "sketched" by Picasso, it is "grasped" and "mastered" by the artist. From then on, the object becomes transparent and seems to disappear before the artist's eyes.
In fact, transparency and obstacles are equivalent, on another level, to filtering and selection. They correspond to the most fundamental human experiences: fruit and loss, memory and forgetting. Artists are not Immortals in the Chinese sense of the term; they have mortal bodies. The artist has a physical body. However, when life experience transforms into visual experience, a true process of accumulations and rejections begins. What is accumulated becomes visible and becomes substance, becomes quality; what is rejected becomes transparent and invisible. What the artist now expresses is what he has collected or rejected from this world. What remains is before our eyes, in its material and colorful splendor, superbly naked; what is forgotten is transparent and without trace. This is the world as it is for the artist. The world appearing in all its qualities. Naked. As the great German writer Hermann Hesse said in The Glass Bead Game: "I hate great simplifiers; I love a sense of quality, inimitable craftsmanship, and uniqueness." Abstract painters are never content to simplify; they have a keen sense of quality. And the colorful qualities will play a primordial role: if, in this increasingly uncertain world, there are no longer countries where "milk and honey would flow", we still have the chance to find, here and there, lands with "colors of rose and honey" (Paul Claudel).
And it is in this nakedness of the world that the future is outlined. The Unknown.