Geneva: Chinese calligraphy on display at the Acacias

On the court side, these aces of the brush are doctors, teachers, musicians, bankers, psychologists and even winegrowers. But their passion for Chinese culture has led them, on the garden side, to practice with as much passion as assiduity the age-old art of calligraphy – for some for more than thirty years. Led by their master, Wang Fei, founder in 1999 of the Poisson mandarin in Plainpalais, this group of artists from the region exhibits their recent creations at the Chapelle des Arts.

Entitled “The Suspended Gesture”, this hanging brings together works on scroll, canvas and paper, mixing traditional and contemporary styles. The title of the presentation refers to the very essence of this ancestral know-how of writing: the movement which imprints its dynamics and rhythm on the line. “The work of the gesture in three dimensions determines the result on the two dimensions of the sheet or the painting,” explains Wang Fei, who is also a lecturer in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Geneva.

Educate your brush

According to the expert born in 1964 in the province of Henan, it is a question of “educating your brush, which deforms when it reaches a surface, by learning to direct its tip in the air”. A basic technique that is acquired in one or two years of practice. Once we have mastered beautiful, “careful and clean” writing, we can give free rein to our emotions, our feelings and our personality: calligraphy then becomes, through the arm and the hand, an extension of the mind.

Because if this art is part of a 3,500-year-old tradition, it can take very current forms, especially in Europe. “Here we go further, we are more focused on the future. People are creative and express themselves freely,” explains Wang Fei, adding that the exhibitions he organizes annually in China with his Swiss students are very successful: “Their thinking has great freshness, it is very touching for us Chinese.”

To the Chapel of the Artssome artists are Chinese speakers and themselves composed the poems that they put on paper, while others focused on reproducing classical characters. Still others chose to express themselves through drawing or composed pieces using calligraphy as a pictorial grammar. They all demonstrate great expressive enthusiasm, combining their Western culture with erudition from a distant civilization and times.

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