They are China's most celebrated landscape

The stone was lying at the bottom of the Lake for thousands of years. Water working its form, the carved patiently. As a work time would be the author, it stands today before the visitors of the forbidden city. Once, at the time of the emperors, it was used to burn incense: thousand holes dug by erosion were heavy clouds of smoke. Then appeared the fantastic image of a distant Summit lost in the clouds. This haunting vision haunts the history of Chinese art to the point that the word landscape said "shan shui": mountains and water.

It was already in the first century before our era, when it burned the drug in the small incense burner in the form of miniature mountain from the tomb of prince Liu Sheng and shown at the Grand Palais, in the exhibition "Celestial mountains." "Treasures of the museums of China", which starts Thursday next year of China. It is probably the first Chinese representation of a landscape. The burning of drugs, as the painting of the nature, finds its sources in old myths: it would be on the ridge "mountain men", these "Immortals" ("xian-ren"), painters and illustrious sages lost in the mists of the summits, or simply in their own tables...

On the five terraces

After a night of train and four hours of car, Wutai Shan (mountains of the five terraces) emerge from the morning to fall. Here, some five hundred kilometres southwest of Beijing, to more than three thousand metres above sea level, are the Buddhist roots of Chinese painting. The mountain is home to some 40 temples and monasteries. Well-travelled tourist stage in summer by the Chinese, Wutai Shan are also a living heritage, a place of pilgrimage and retreat. Gold calligraphy, reds, the Greens of the pagodas, walls and dragons detach from the thick layer of white snow that covers the temples. It is the Chinese ink in black and white, but very close to an aesthetic Tibetan or even Indian origins of Buddhism. The long echo of the sutras rehearsed by the monks is sprinkled by the "dagoba" of the Tayuan temple bells. This colossal white stupa of more than sixty metres high contains relics of the Buddha. Under the Tang (618-907), the Wutai housed more than three hundred and fifty monasteries.

At the foot of the five terraces, the tiny Nanchan, Dean of the Chinese temples, date 782 after Jesus Christ. For thirty years, Ms. Guo performs many pilgrimages. Kneeling on the icy steps, it is three times his forehead to the ground and has the sutras of paper at the door of wood. Then, she packed a match which immediately engulfed the sacred text. She observes the volutes climb up towards the sky and melting into the icy atmosphere. What fascinates Ms. Guo in paper ashtray is not so much destruction that the passage from one State to another, this transition from the visible to the invisible which the smoke is the ephemeral event. One thinks of the powerful smell of incense that always captures us at the entrance to the temples. The sutras did not disappear, they are dissolved in the space. A gust of wind scatters the last ashes: "Where does the white when the snow has melted", asked the Japanese nobel prize Kenzaburo undersea quoting Shakespeare in one of his novels. This time where the visible hand in smoke refers us to the transcendental essence religious Chinese landscape.

Mystique of the transformation

In his practice even painting evokes a mystique of the transformation. Four hundred kilometers west of Shanghai, the city of Tunxi continues to spread at the foot of the Huang Shan (mountains yellow). Here is the factory of the country the most deemed ink. Since the 18th century, it repeats the same movements: on pétrit a cedar ash, oil and resin paste, on the beats to the gavel, the press and it is dry. Liquid ink becomes solid, before that the painter, in the Remover on a stone, loop cycle by bringing back the State liquid, enriched its transformations. It can then be dipped his brush.

Huang Shan welcome several hundreds of thousands of Chinese visitors each year. Unlike the Wutai mountains akin to any specific religion. They are China's most celebrated landscape. They were described by the poet Li Bai in the Tang, in the famous texts of the stroller Xu Xiake under the Ming dynasty and inspired such painters T'ao and Mei Qing (whose striking "Nineteen views of the Huang mountains" are presented at the Grand Palais) under the Qing. At the Summit, the silhouette of Deng Xiaoping, in short, cane in hand and hair in the wind, is confused in the clouds. On the giant poster caption reminds us

that he conquers this steep trail in July 1979 to more than seventy years. A slogan insists: "his great ambition and his iron will make the name Huang Shan borders." At this time, the little helmsman, who had just resume the reins of power, sut therefore use the mythical landscape to extol the effectiveness of its policy of openness.

In a few seconds, the visitor sees more than to grey. Huang Shan refuse any line of flight in view: on the haze, as drawn on a white background, arise from murky shadows disappear immediately. Rocks, trees, clouds are light and evanescent, as cut in the same matter. In October, the branches, bare of any sheet, are dry as ink strokes. Yet, in the most profound, while fog is becoming clearer: Rock Centennial of the forbidden city, the small incense burner of prince Liu Sheng, the face of Ms. Guo before the smoke of the sutras, is a story of clouds and moving forms. Such water working the stone at the bottom of the Lake, the mist constantly changes the shape of the mountains and rocks, it prints to the landscape a slow pace, an almost hypnotic evolution. "The Chinese painter captures the world in its essential transition," wrote François Jullien in "the great image has no form.

We then understand why Chinese paintings do not support the rigidity of a framework. They take place, a little like opening a book, appear gradually, to give to see only partially. On walking there a moment, and then it closes the roll. The Shanghai Museum has developed a clever system that reproduces the movement of the rollers: works not illuminate when one approaches the showcase. As soon as one moves away from just a few steps, they entry in the dark. See a roll, to be quite ready for that entire eludes us. Unlike the Western box table, the ideal distance to enjoy these works is not one that embrace them as a whole. We fixed a moment a booth, then are immersed in white before a fisherman or a wandering monk. Trees, temples or vagrants appear and disappear, chanting the rise of our gaze in the landscape.

Magical alternations

Fugitive, light is finally on the Huang Shan. Dispelling the clouds, it ignites a gradient of black rocks and illuminates a grove of trees suspended from the vacuum. It clarifies at the same time astonished faces of hikers. More than the dazzling beauty of the panorama, which makes this magical moment, this is the feeling of living intensely for a few seconds the founding rhythm of Chinese culture. Yin/yang shadow/light, hot/cold, hidden/apparent... scroll time a breath of wind mystical alternating underlying the tao. Then, the cloud cover smooth cliffs. The landscape pulses still a moment and this vision is already more than a memory. The experience is poignant: we have to attend to life and the death of a landscape. Beyond the theories, the history of art or the sinology, is suddenly understood why there is often the impression before painting Chinese that the mountain is emerging from the white background or to dissolve, feel the breathing of the world that Victor Segalen described in "Paintings", its strange series of imaginary Chinese tables: "what is painted here has concrete than its complacency to be seen." All this deigns to appear. But note well, blow, all this may disappear.

Chinese painters were not in the mountains sacred to is a trestle. They took the brush only once returned home. They pull us so not in a real landscape, but we invite you to explore the intimate mountains of their memory. "Poetry is where will the spirit", says the preface to the "classic of odes". Roller, more that the view of a chain of mountains, artists have retransmitted a sense: the distant echo of a momentary vision. Segalen concluded his book: "So many things, entr'aperçues, will never be seen."

Rollers and objects exposed in Paris render not only landscapes that fade into white, they also invite us to dive there way this legendary sage held prisoner by the Emperor: there were a small sculpture of Peng Lai, paradise of the Taoist mountains in the Palace. By looking at the Emperor sighed: "an". only an immortal can access! "The immortal began to laugh, rose in the air, rapetissa, rapetissa, and became small enough to cross the silver doors guarding the miniature mountain. On revit never. Was informed more later the Emperor that the sage had crossed the sea on a yellow Mare. This story reveals the fabulous power to works that not only reduce the mountains but also, sometimes, the spectators themselves.