“ Happy is he who, like Ulysses, has undertaken a lengthy
voyage…”
My journey to China began in 1996, and to my great astonishment,
has continued until the present day - for all that I regularly find
my mind meandering in nostalgic fashion towards the distant shores
of the Mediterranean.
It was on Sunday the 4th of August 1996 that I landed at Beijing
Airport, never suspecting that my life’s path was about to take an
entirely new twist.
On the 29th of August 1996 I came home to France, my eyes full of
hitherto undreamt of images and undiscovered lands, and with
several notebooks filled with fading scribbles of snatched moments
from Beijing, from Beidahe, and from Chengde - the staging posts of
my first ventures into China.
In January 1997 I returned once more to China, this time to
settle there for a stay which still has no fixed conclusion.
Over the course of the years that followed, I made many, and
sometimes repeated forays into the provinces of Hebei, Shanxi,
Henan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Xinjiang, Guangxi, and Shanghai. I
did not visit every single destination that tempted me – odd as it
might sound, the eleven years of my sojourn here have left me
insufficient time. My life in Beijing, and my experiences in a city
still strange and exotic even in the 1990s, have absorbed me to the
full. I have no regrets on this account, for Beijing has changed
over the years, and only a prolonged stay could give me the
opportunity to appreciate its full palette of riches. This past
that I knew has gone for good, disappearing under clouds of cement.
The Forbidden City alone remains unchanging – a substantial part of
its treasures remain inaccessible to the general public, treasures
to which I had the great good fortune to enjoy privileged access
over a period of two years.
If time, then, was my closest ally in allowing me to discover and
to paint Beijing, it was likewise time that enabled me, in fits and
starts, to capture with my brush the diversity of some of the other
provinces of China.
The brevity of some of my trips left me hardly time enough for
more than first impressions – however seductive, these have little
more depth than the fleeting glimpses of any passing tourist, with
one sole exception: Cangyanshan, in Hebei. Thus I leave it to my
sketch pad to preserve in memory the images of my hasty forays into
the fishing village close to Beidahe, to the bleached junks on the
shores of the Bohai Sea, to the Great Wall north of Beijing on the
borders of the ancient lands of Manchuria, to Changde, to Shanghai,
to Kaifeng and to Luoyang.
I am confident in my choice of the provinces that I present here
– the provinces where I have spent most time. That is not to say
that I make any claim to knowing them well; it would be as
presumptuous of me to lay claim to ‘knowing’ them as it is for any
who claim to have ‘done China’ on the basis of a week or two spent
at the mercy of an organized tour.
I have also made a point of choosing a selection of provinces
that present landscapes so diverse that it is hard to credit that
they could all come from one single nation: China.
Urban development in China has transformed some of my townscapes,
and in many cases simply wiped all traces of them from the map. By
this very fact a documentary significance has been conferred on my
works that did not form part of my original intentions. I became an
artist who bore witness to the time and the place in which I grew.
This notwithstanding, I did make it part of my brief to capture
with my brush not only my own immediate impressions, but also some
sense of the feelings and the understanding that these scenes
inspired in me. My journey evolved from the aesthetic to the
pedagogic, as I gradually acquired knowledge of the history, the
art, and the philosophy of the Chinese. This is why I accompany
each of my drawings with some words that express the feelings, the
sense, the thoughts and the memories that I experienced while
producing them. This book attempts to gather together a few samples
of a greater whole.
So it is only natural that I should dedicate this work to all
those who were my companions, and who provided me with the
knowledge that enriched the tip of my brush at the time, and who
still help to pollinate the fruits of my journeys through
China.
Today, 11 years after my first trip to Beijing, the breeze that
guides my steps has carried me far to the south, down below the
Tropic of Cancer to Macao, to the port that for many centuries was
the gateway into and out of China.
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