Ink and Oil drawings (China)

On blotting paper, lines emerge, deepen, and come to life to represent an idea, a thought, a state of mind, a meditative wisdom, an intense spirituality. The eyes are the mirror of the inner life. The geometric mind precedes the analytical and abstract thinking of modern humans. The face, gate to the mind, acts as an arena for observation through the eyes, nostrils, and ears but also for communication through the mouth. 

Six hundred million years ago, a worm-shaped creature, a few millimeters long or wider, swam or crawled on the sea floor with embryonic eyes and a nervous system. It was the common ancestor of humans and cephalopods in the vast ocean of origins. In the first instants of life - the Cambrian period - eye embryos gave form to the compound eyes of insects and our camera eyes. The evolution of the human face began five hundred million years ago with the appearance of vertebrates. Mouth, nostrils, eyes, and ears form double sets. They are the tools at our disposal in our exchange with the Universe.

It is not in space that I wish to travel but in time to return to the buried memories of a universal source. I once came across Laird Scranton's book, in which he notes that the word ki in Dogon culture, which means "to invert, reverse, return," is the root of the term kikinu, which refers to a structure in the shape of a nose or tent (^). Incidentally, in ancient Chinese decorative art (神与兽的纹样学 Editions San-Lian, 2009), the common representation of the straight or inverted V, particularly on the frontal space or to trace the nose, would refer to qian associated with the first principle and the breath that the nose, a protruding part of the face, allows circulating. Furthermore, The word spirit also comes from the Latin Spiritus (Breath).

The first bestial figures appeared in ancient Chinese decorative art with the Liangzhu civilization (3310-2250 BCE). Gigantic bestial representations tend to disappear from the Eastern Zhou dynasty (8th century BC) to make place for objects of smaller size that history has left us either in funerary tombs or buried in haste during the flight of fallen sovereigns from the Northern invaders.

From the Spring and Autumn period (8th century BC), bestial figures tend to be represented obliquely, making their identification difficult. The decorative art of that period continued to reproduce the style of the Zhou dynasty until around 600 BC when contemporary forms arose. From the Hans (3rd century), tigers and buffaloes were less present in decorative art than bears and deer. The life-size representations of stone lions coincide with the development of relations with distant lands of the West. Through a succession of bestial figures, that includes the most surprising animal representations, such as tapirs, we wonder whether there existed common mythological roots spread by human migrations. The mythical ophidian with a mammal's head or mammalian attributes reminds me of the omnipresent image of Taotie 饕餮, an indescribable monster like a hybrid combination of a dragon and a wild boar. It is suggested that the dragon figure may have spread from South Africa to China. Tales and myths are keys to understanding the origins.