The symbiosis between man and nature in François Cheng

Lecture by Guochuan ZHANG, Associate Professor of Chinese at INALCO.

Francois Cheng 程抱一 "Embracing Unity" – he wrote his first prose poem in Chinese at the age of 15. Titled Water, it is transcribed for the Notebook No. 140, dedicated to him by Éditions de L'Herne (October 5, 2022). His poetic career and schooling disrupted by the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45, he arrived in Paris on December 31, 1948, having chosen to remain there, without knowing a word of French. After language courses at the Alliance Française and studies in Chinese civilizations at the Sorbonne, he discovered and experienced "the intoxication of naming things anew, as at the dawn of time." He then endeavored to introduce Chinese poetry and art to the West through major essays and monographs on classical painters. He continued this dialogue between cultures by translating French and Chinese poets, while also embarking on his own literary career with his first novel. The Tale of TianyiIn parallel, he developed a poetic work in French, crowned by several collections including an essential trilogy published by Gallimard.

The conference focuses on volume To the east of everything, published in 2005 by Gallimard, which actually compiles five earlier collections. Ms. Guochuan Zhang presents The symbiosis between man and nature based primarily on the first two collections: Double chant composed of two parts: One day, the stones (I) and The tree within us spoke (II); and Tuscan Cantos, “an expanded dialogue with the earth that sustains us, this valley where souls grow” in reference to John Keats’ “The Vale of the Soul-making”.

For François Cheng, nature is never truly a backdrop; he has always admired its beauty, a source of inspiration. His attachment to nature is rooted in two emblematic places: Mount Lu in China and Tuscany.

Shitao (1642-1707), View of the waterfall on Mount Lu (detail). ©Sen-oku Museum.

Shitao (1642-1707). View of Mount Huang. ©Palace Museum, Beijing.

Shitao (1642-1707), Bamboo in ink, (private collection).

François Cheng reveals the aesthetics of Chinese poetry, drawing on ancient painting and calligraphy through the study of Shitao (1642-1707) and his paintings. View of the waterfall on Mount LuThe painting, preserved in the Sen-oku Museum in Japan, is the experience of the external landscape becoming man's inner world. Mount Lu was not chosen at random: it is a major Buddhist and Taoist site in China. An emblematic and sacred mountain for humankind, it echoes the dialectic of the double song, as in Tuscan Cantos (Unes, 1999), where nature and man have a dialogue of closeness and natural respect: "like the sun-filled earth that carries us."

On a more personal note, around the age of seven or eight, young François spent every summer at Mont Lu, a small mountain range situated on the banks of a river and surrounded by lakes, creating mists that would part, mysteriously revealing the peaks of Mont Lu: "The river water evaporates into clouds, falls again as rain, replenishing the current of eternal return." For him, mists and clouds were one of the links in the cycle of the water, an image omnipresent in his poetry and illustration of Taoist cosmology.

These two natural settings are imbued with the gazes and reflections between nature and humankind; they are emblematic of art history: in China, with over 4,000 poetic works dedicated to Mount Lu, and simultaneously in Tuscany, the cradle of numerous artists during the Italian Renaissance. Nature, far from being an inert and passive entity, engages in a dialogue with humankind. If humankind looks at it, it looks back. If humankind speaks to it, it speaks back. A reversal of perspectives occurs between humankind and nature: while humankind becomes the interior of the landscape, the landscape becomes humankind's inner landscape. François Cheng's poetry collections establish a constant dialogue between macrocosm and microcosm, between being and nature.

In the Shijing, or Classic poems, the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry, bringing together poems from the 15th^e the 5^e Centuries before our era, we already find the use of natural images to express human emotions. The poetic processes of the " bi » (comparison) and the « xing » (incitement) reveal the the profoundly human dimension of natureIn comparison to Western poetry, F. Cheng shows that the metaphor can be considered close to bi by using visual comparison (the bi embodies a process from subject to object: movement of the subject, man, towards nature), and the metonymy in this sense can be close to xingBecause it is based on continuity and brings meaning closer (the movement of the object, of nature, towards humankind). According to F. Cheng, one suggests far more through images than by directly expressing one's feelings. For him, one should not describe feelings in detail, but rather bring them together and present them as images; through images. The poet thus appears as a decipherer, as much as an organizer of images. What emerges through these two stylistic devices is the ever-renewed relationship between humankind and nature.

François Cheng. Breath-Spirit. Essays Collection. Publisher: Points.

Su Shi (1037-1101), Dried Tree and Strange Rock (private collection).

The wild goose, representing the animal kingdom or the migratory bird, already occupies a prominent place in traditional Chinese aesthetics (painting and calligraphy). Here, it also represents the poet himself, soaring between two worlds and acting as a bridge between two cultures. When he was elected a member of the French Academy in 2022 and decided on the design of his academician's sword, it bore the discreet symbols of his personal and intimate universe. Among them, those of the distant traveler, with the flight of wild geese, which inevitably recalls the last two stanzas on page 39 of To the east of everything (Poetic Works, Gallimard Poetry, 2005):

Only moon on only pond
Where does the wild goose fly from?
Towards open infinity
Within yourself

From the plant kingdom emerge several figures of traditional Chinese aesthetics, taken up by F. Cheng, including two expressions dear to scholars. three friends in cold weather, Suihan Sanyou, refer to pine visit us at the bamboo and plum, and embody the virtues of perseverance, integrity and modesty, thus representing the essential qualities of the educated man.

And the four good men, or noble plants (花中四君子) which are the orchid, bamboo, le chrysanthème et le plum treeA favorite theme of scholars in flower and bird paintings, who identified these four plants with Confucian virtues as integrity et perseverance.

In his discourse on virtue, F. Cheng explains the symbolic meaning of bamboo, whose sharp stalks resemble the strokes of calligraphy. Bamboo embodies uprightness, freshness, self-transcendence, and humility, thanks to its staged growth and its "empty" heart, a symbol of emptiness. Its leaves, whispering in the wind, add a final virtue: the meditative grace of contemplation and song.

Le rockAnother recurring symbol in François Cheng's work is commonly associated with that of the tree. This "tree-rock" association is part of a long tradition found in the works of Chinese scholars and is thus intimately linked to François Cheng's artistic approach. This is a quest that F. Cheng himself supports during the writing of Breath-Spirit (1989) and which supports his own artistic creation. He devotes an entire chapter to it, entitled "Trees and rocks" in which he explains the philosophical values ​​that he associates with his elements, as well as the pictorial techniques that give them life.

Sometimes a withered tree and barren rock, sometimes a luxuriant tree and fertile rock, the complementarity of these representations creates a harmony between these two symbols, allowing each to lend meaning and existence to the other. In the tradition of scholars, the rock takes on multiple meanings and forms: solitude, persistence, the embodiment of eternity. François Cheng draws upon these meanings and emphasizes that rocks represent the pursuit of ideals and faith, illustrating the necessity of persevering in the face of life's trials. In his poems, he personifies rocks and creates a link between painting and human emotions.

Beyond this initial symbiosis between nature and man, something else is revealed. another form of symbiosis, which unites the arts, constant and present throughout the poetry, the painting and calligraphyThis creative symbiosis of the arts reinforces the complex network of meanings between materials and images. Through the chosen corpus, the conference focuses specifically on three prominent figures, emblematic of François Cheng's poetry and which refer to three symbolic images from the Chinese aesthetic tradition : The wild goose for the fauna, bamboo for the flora, and the rock for the non-organic..

François Cheng's academician's sword, created by the jeweler Mellerio.

François Cheng. To the East of Everything. NRF. Gallimard Publisher, 2005.

François Cheng, And the breath becomes a sign, Paris, 2014, pp. 80-81. Publisher L'Iconoclaste.

François Cheng, And the breath becomes a sign, Paris, 2014, p. 111. Publisher L'Iconoclaste.

His academician's sword bears a tribute to one of his favorite arts: calligraphy, with the presence of the character 和, meaning "harmony." This character evokes the concert of voices, the act of "echoing," and implies echo, accord, harmony, peace, and unity—all central notions in the artist's thought, which he puts into practice on his sword and in his works.

In his calligraphic work, François Cheng renews the approach to Chinese characters by giving them a roundness that contrasts with the traditional square structure. He also introduces small dots, interpreted either as the presence of man or as the embodiment of breath (qi) which runs through and enlivens the work. Mobile and circular, these points play a "nervous" role comparable to that of the tiny figure in Chinese landscapes or the colored dot in Corot, bringing a human vibration to the heart of the composition.

In addition to adding dots to his calligraphy, François Cheng also plays with the very form of the characters. He disrupts the traditional balance of Chinese characters by introducing a symbiosis between the fluidity of Chinese strokes and Western cursive script. He thus plays on the ambivalence of the writing systems of his two cultures. This interplay reflects the ambivalence of his bicultural writing and can materialize in the creation of new characters, when he decides to merge the characters of his two cultures and removes one of the radicals to create a single character, uniting them. This union is also found on his academician's sword, which bears the initials "FC," symbolizing both his artist name and the cultural acronym France-China. Through his art, François Cheng expresses a union between his two cultures and a symbiosis between humankind and nature.

France-Gabrielle de la Gueronnière and Clara Monnier-Blondeau.