The pictures gathered here are enigmatic messengers. They come to us laden with the time and space traveled, various trials, forgotten memories, half-fulfilled possibilities. We are the addressees, we can feel it: they make their way toward us, to meet us. They can offer to our gaze a misleading self-evidence. At first glance, you believe that you can detect connections, correspondences, a congruence of imaginaries. Yet, as you allow the picture to unfurl before you, it ends up belying all these overly rapid impressions. It has its own rhythm, its original, separate way of questioning.

　　These pictures are, at first, luminous testimonies of a lifetime. I am happy to have crossed, on our respective paths—from China to France and from France to China—Wang Yan Cheng. There is no need to know him in order to love his paintings, no doubt about that. Yet I am not so sure that one might understand them completely while disregarding the painter's life, his generosity, his so distinctive sensibility. His pictures seem to be an extension of his person, transmitting a vocal intonation, betraying a barely sketched gesture. Here more than ever, the painter is the instrument of his painting. He submits his entire existence to this practice, spending long hours in the studio in order to add a layer to the picture.

　　For Wang Yan Cheng, to paint is to exist. He seems, very early on, to have set himself the immense task of taming time. He endeavors to do so by means of a slowly-matured painting technique, densifying the color while bringing out, little by little, the nonfigurative. The pictures we see here are concretions of time—more precisely, they are, without a doubt, compressions of time, like the twenty-four images per second of the cinematic image, but at its monstrous and almost geologic rhythm. These are double exposures of moments that—through color and shapes—are able to make visible time duration, the momentum which animates it and makes it habitable by man. Basically, the pictures' depth arises from a chronological and not geological perspective. The superimposition of different times generates to contrasts, beckons one's gaze, and carries it beyond. The pictures are all the more alive.

　　This discovery sets us at the heart of what seems to me to be the true enigma of Wang Yan Cheng's painting work, that of harmony and composition. Wang Yan Cheng investigates composition more than representation. Abstraction here is a decoy. The game is played in the carefully delineated space of the picture, in this window opened on another reality. His way of questioning separates itself from a long nineteenth- and twentieth-century tradition so as to return to a more ancient problem, that of the occupation of space, of the aesthetic laws of equilibria, of sensations. Fundamentally, he descends from the Impressionists more than from the Moderns (extending from Cézanne to the Cubists or to Abstract Art). His object is really the visible, and not the real; the image and the illumination, not the icon.

　　He offers to our gaze scenes, landscapes removed from reality, thus giving the impression of a revelation of the existent. His paintings owe much to the landscapes of Shandong Province, where he awoke to painting, where he conquered his palette, and where he tested his technique. In the deep greens and the bright blues, in the bites of colors, one rediscovers the solemn vegetation of this peninsula plunged into the East China Sea, this land of mountains, waters, and spirits where the memory of Confucius still stands vigil twenty-five centuries on. In this regard, the comparison with the painting of Zao Wou Ki is hasty, superficial. Basically, the two approaches differ completely. One struggles with chaos, the other composes with the opposites, apportioning in space what each principle loses in purity, in singularity, in simplicity. Such painting is an accommodation, with life, with reality. It draws from this its dignity and its nobility of sensible art.

　　How can't we think of the concept—so central for China, so rooted in the forests of Shandong—of harmony? Harmony is composition. No chaos, no intertwined darkness in the works of Wang Yan Cheng. Like the surface of the Earth, the canvas's surface is full. It calls forth the composition through a process of sharing. The landscapes are far away. You believe that you can make out a sky, the obscurity of a copse, the lively dotted colors of a spring meadow. Wang Yan Cheng takes us by the hand and leads us into a territory wholly inhabited and organized by harmony, wholly subject to its laws.

　　There is indeed a lesson to be drawn from this spectacle. Harmony is not an appeal to return to the average. On the contrary, it is the principle of resistance of diversity opposite the powerful homogenization of the forces of the universe. It pertains to combat. Nothing tepid or conventional in the contrasts, the associations of colors, the equilibria of large masses. The canvases allow colors which do not seem likely to be found in nature to burst through, and yet they offer a even more faithful reproduction. Take, for example, the brilliantly-lit patches. Some canvases are crossed with streaks of light, like a bank of phosphorescent plankton carried by the tides.

　　What is uniting these canvases? Wang Yan Cheng's pictures, let us admit, can be disconcerting. As soon as you believe that you have found a framework, a motif, a key leading from one picture to another, a single picture emerges that invalidates the theory.

　　Some of these compositions seem to loom up from an electron microscope, searching for the mysteries of life or from an astronomical captures looking deep through the skies. You think that you can make out some gaseous vortexes, filaments, spiral structures, iridescences that allow to discern the presence and interaction of the observer—or of his instrument—and of the object under observation. This is perhaps the special feature of Wang Yan Cheng's work: a science of the gaze. This is a kind of painting that is nourished upon the visions and revelations of a century of science, upon a new access to a reality that extends from the tremendously small to the tremendously large, and upon a visible realm reduced to the very limited capacities of the human eye and detached from anything real—barely just the narrow bandwidth in which we are immersed. Abstraction is in the real as the worm is in the fruit. It is up to the artist to render it visible in his turn—to offer visions of excess, to decenter reality, to expel man from the hearth of the creation he has occupied and usurped for so many years. More than a work on figuration that would bring him to abstraction, as the Twentieth Century has endeavored to do, here it is a matter of representing the abstract—in its raw state, so to speak. It is an instrumental effort, an observation of excess. It certainly relies, upon the gaze of other artists, whose reminiscences are thought to arise, but basically, it follows its own path. It is perhaps to be placed after abstraction. More than the issue of representation, it is the issue of optical interaction that explains his painting work: the diffractions, deformations, and reconstitutions of the instrument grasping reality in a quantum age, when it is known that the very presence of the instrument alters—nay, creates—the observational object.

　　Another clue keeps us at the picture's surface and prevents us from plunging into it. The images all have a particular grain, like photographs of landscapes or faces that resist registration. As if dodging the effort of one's gaze to grasp and subdue reality, Wang Yan Cheng's canvases seem to keep to themselves, to escape before our gaze. They are covered with a veil, a layer of snow, or sometimes a meshwork of horizontal and vertical brush strokes. Like a sentence from Kafka, they endeavor to render reality viewable. Like Pope Innocent X's curtains in works by Diego Velázquez and Francis Bacon, they allow a showing while still hiding. In China, it is supposed that nature in its entirety stretches its veil beneath the singularity of Heaven. From the encounter between the two principles is born the mist, which is at bottom the very form of the gaze.

　　For, it cannot be forgotten that Wang Yan Cheng is thoroughly Chinese, in his way of thinking, in his imaginary, in his very reservedness. The recognition Wang Yan Cheng enjoys in France testifies to the deep understanding that binds French culture together with Chinese culture. Elective affinities have pushed out their shoots for centuries, in a shared relation to time and the arts. These two revolutionary countries have had to reinvent themselves in order to confront the challenge of modernity. The United States was born modern. Great Britain has nourished itself upon tradition. Both France and China struggle to maintain the spirited coupling of these two principles. One of the two quests for balance, the other searches for harmony.

　　In thirty years of a fine career as a painter set astride the two endpoints of the Eurasian continent, Wang Yan Cheng has been in no want of recognition on either one side or the other. He has accumulated prestigious honors and prizes. He has had exhibition after exhibition throughout the world and in the most beautiful museums. He is the living example of the fruitful dialogue that, for centuries, has created ties along the Silk Road, and which today is to be brought back to life and to be made to live anew, and of that thin thread that has always been the symbol at once of civilization and of the unity of the inhabited and known world. Wang Yan Cheng carries high these qualities of dialogue, mutual respect, and fine research characteristic of that ancient aspiration.

　　Harmony is indeed the sign under which Wang Yan Cheng paints and lives.

作者：德维尔潘（英）