We would miss Jiang Qionger’s genius if we only saw her as an abstract painter, that is if we considered her as the heir of a pictorial tradition born from the Western mode of thinking which can only comprehend the world through dual oppositions: figurative/abstract, ancient/modern, yes/no. The daughter of a China which has thrown itself headlong into the adventure of development, she is indeed perfectly familiar with our modernity whose codes she became acquainted with during a two-year stay in France and whose icons she regularly mixes with today. We would then conclude, indulging in the short-sighted ideas of fashion rather than genuine analysis, that Jiang Qionger is an example of bi-culturalism, an artistic and conceptual bridge between East and West. I know full well that ours is a time of cross-cultural pollination. But I assert that Jiang Qionger is a primary identity, what defines her artistic practice, is her Chineseness. Writing this, I do not refer to her art as belonging to some incomprehensible exoticism, some unsurpassable otherness: I name the key which opens onto the mental universe that has created the fabric of China and, beyond the borders of this country, the fabric of all the sinicized world. A mental universe which, through its very difference, exalts the infinite variety of the mind. It would be easy, and therefore deceptive, to place Jiang Qionger’s painting in the tradition of some great predecessors, bi-cultural like herself: Zao Wou-Ki...
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