Of flame and azure, François Cheng and Kim En Joong

From March 15 to June 12, 2022, discover in the painting room the works carried out with four hands by Francois Cheng et Kim En Joong, major figures of cultural exchanges between France and Asia, combining painting, calligraphy and literature.

 Kim En Joong (born in 1940)

Kim En Joong is studying art at the University of Seoul. At the same time, he became a drawing teacher at the Catholic seminary, where he discovered Christianity. Two years after receiving baptism, he left in 1969 for Switzerland. He studied philosophy there and, the following year, entered the Dominican order to complete his novitiate. Ordained a priest in 1974, he was assigned to Paris, to the convent of the Annunciation, in order to best reconcile the exercise of his apostolic activity and his career as a painter.

painting and writing

Throughout his life, François Cheng seeks and encourages encounters between his native culture and that of his adopted country. He embodies them in the main character of his best-known novel, The Saying of Tian-yi, and provokes them as much by his translations into Chinese of French texts as by his work in the field of sinology. The collaboration with Kim En Joong gave him the opportunity to give them a new form by combining painting and quatrains written in French, in the way that the Chinese painters of yesteryear adorned their works with poetry and inscriptions. .