Le Songe Creux – between literati theory, Minimalism and Maximalism

Abstract

After quoting Anthony Gormley, who once said that his work could ‘speak to the whole world’, the author explains how his research in Chinese painting theory has informed his art practice. After describing how the time spent in drawing the project titled Le Songe Creux can be understood with notions borrowed from Chinese art theory, he emphasizes its similarities with several projects of contemporary Chinese artists who have placed the disappearance of Self and the artwork at the center of their preoccupations, as well as how the blandness of these drawings, made of thousands of lines, can be understood in the context of Chinese literati painting theory. The idea of void in particular, central to this art practice, is also a concept straddling two philosophical traditions: neo-Confucian philosophy and phenomenology. In this context, the idea of Maximalism, defined by the Chinese curator Gao Minglu and very close to the theory of Le Songe Creux, can be seen as a contemporary attempt to negotiate the concept of void, a concept which was treated differently by phenomenology and neo-Confucianism, as the French philosopher François Jullien has shown in his comparative works. Several installations, based on Michel Foucault's idea of heterotopias, were conceived to convey more efficiently the idea of materialist spirituality conveyed by this art project. Finally, to criticize the idea of universalism in the making and appreciating of artworks, the author concludes that his own art practice is clearly defined culturally and can only appeal to ‘a part of the world’.