This article has originally been published in T Magazine China on June 11, 2024. T Magazine China, published since 2015, is one of China’s most influential culture magazines.

France-China: how can we continue to foster dialogue between art scenes located 10,000 kilometers apart in an age of ecological crisis?

In 2020, I discovered choreographer Jérôme Bel‘s latest show, Xiao Ke, at the Centre Pompidou, as part of a series of portraits of dancers directed by the artist. On stage, the French choreographer spoke and moved with the Chinese dancer via Skype, his computer screen projected onto the stage. While this was a way of circumventing the impossibility of traveling during the Covid-19 pandemic, it was also, and above all, perfectly in line with Jérôme Bel’s decision, in 2019, to no longer fly his company to tour its shows around the world, out of a concern to protect the planet. This ecological principle, while imposing a strong constraint, actually proves to be artistically fruitful: rather than having his company travel to disseminate its repertoire, Jérôme Bel “adapts” each show in collaboration with locally recruited dancers whom he has rehearsed by Skype, thus giving each new version of his show a unique coloration and local specificity. 

The ecological crisis is prompting cultural institutions to reflect on their sustainability, both in terms of their practices and their programming. 

In 2021, the French Ministry of Culture published a “Charter for the Sustainable Development of Festivals”, which many French cultural institutions and events are now striving to respect. Public reports (such as the Shift Project’s “Decarbonizing Culture” report in 2021), experimental initiatives (such as those led by the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) and creative climate coalitions (Art+Climat Action, Border Art, The Gallery Climate Coalition) advocate the implementation of best practices with regard to the production, reception of audiences and promotion of artistic events: identify local resources available for the creation and production of works, call on experts in ecological transition to parameterize a project or implement measures to offset emissions as effectively as possible, raise public awareness of environmental issues through educational and participatory workshops, evaluate an institution’s or event’s eco-design approach and share best practices in order to contribute to systemic change in the arts world…

An alternative agricultural technique invented in the 1970s by scientists David Holmgren and Bill Mollison, at a time of intensive monoculture, permaculture (a contraction of “culture” and “permanence”) involves growing several plant species at once, and regularly fallowing part of the land. In recent years, this practice, which focuses less on performance than on the sustainability of the land, the complementarity of planted species and attention to the ecosystem, has inspired a number of experimental initiatives within institutions or cultural projects in France and Europe. 

Back in 2016, artist Olivier Darné responded to a call for projects from the town hall of Saint-Denis, a poor suburb of Paris, to occupy a large plot of land that had been used for monoculture of lettuce for decades. There, the artist created a “Zone Sensible” (or ‘sensitive zone’, a name that plays on the double meaning of “sensitive”: a zone where the senses are awake and alert, and a difficult urban zone), an “art and food center”, planting hundreds of permaculture plant species, whose harvests are sold at a fair price to local residents, and inviting artists (visual artists, theater or dance troupes) to rehearse or create works in situ. 

The contemporary art center Le Magasin (Grenoble), under the impetus of its former director Béatrice Josse, wanted to bring artists on board for the long term, reintegrate the site by relying on local resources, propose shared governance, re-found the École du Magasin to train eco-responsible curators…

Shortly after his appointment as president of the Palais de Tokyo in 2022, Guillaume Désanges shared his “petit traité de la permaculture institutionnelle” (little treatise on institutional permaculture). The approach is all-encompassing: observe before acting, program in the service of a need, produce better, communicate soberly, work in a collaborative ecosystem with other institutions, use spaces sensibly – leaving some fallow, offering staggered tour routes or reducing opening hours (12-10pm instead of midday-midnight) to avoid wasting heating and air-conditioning, and so on. 

Ecological urgency is also a growing concern in the work of artists, and is reflected in the programming of several institutions.

By proposing to abandon the concept of Nature (in the sense of the classical opposition to culture), because for him the boundary between the two has disappeared, and to define the Anthropocene (the influence of human beings on ecosystems) as a new geological epoch, Bruno Latour has participated in a global evolution in thinking about modernity and the living (Latour actually gave a series of lectures in China in 2017, notably at CAFA and Himalayas Museum). The sociologist and philosopher, who has inspired countless artists, has also curated numerous exhibitions and biennials. 

In Paris, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, created in 1967 by a couple of collectors who had placed naturalized animals in front of painted landscapes in a mansion in the historic Marais district, has in recent years shifted its focus to explore manʼs relationship with animals and nature throughout history. Since the renovation and extension of the Museum in 2007, temporary exhibitions have been as many opportunities for invited contemporary artists to take over the premises as to engage in dialogue with the rich and varied collections: Eva Jospin, Tania Mouraud, Johan Creten…

Most recently, two major performing arts institutions, the MC93 theater (Bobigny) and the Centre national de la danse – CND (Pantin) have programmed highlights linked to the ecological transition. Jérôme Bel was invited by the CND to program an entire season entitled “Recommencer ce monde” (Restart the world). And in his latest show, Danses non humaines (Non-Human Dances), in collaboration with art historian Estelle Zhong Mengual, the choreographer explores the relationship between art and dance, past and present, and the living world.

Many contemporary Chinese artists also make a detour into their past artistic tradition’s relationship with the living, in order to shed light on our present: all the more so as the representation of nature has a much longer history in China, where shanshui painting developed as early as the Han period, whereas Western painting did not take an interest in landscape until the 17th century.

It’s a point of friction between the French and Chinese art scenes on an eminently topical issue that has been of great interest to us at Doors in recent years. The art agency based in Paris and Beijing that I set up in 2017 with Bérénice Angremy recently organized an exhibition in Paris by the painter and ceramics artist Chen Jialing, as part of the 60th anniversary of relations between France and China and in association with the Shanghai International Culture Association, curated by Cao Dan and He Jing. This artist, who follows in the tradition of shanshui and has spent his life surveying and painting rivers and mountains as part of a spiritual quest, saw his monumental landscapes exhibited in a former 14th-century convent in central Paris (the Réfectoire des Cordeliers). 

Until June 23, at the Fotografiska art center in Shanghai, an exhibition curated by myself, “Go With the Flow”, features photographic and video works by Zhuang Hui, Chen Qiulin, Michael Cherney, Sui Taca and Cheng Xinhao, five artists who bear witness to the transformations of the Chinese landscape over the last thirty years, between realism and poetry, between exploration of their own subjectivity and collective consciousness. 

For the Chinese brand Icicle’s Paris cultural space in 2022, we turned to the literate tradition of stone collecting and European cabinets of curiosities to explore the link between nature and artifice with artists Noémie Goudal, Zhan Wang, Shao Wenhuan, Charlotte Charbonnel and Jonathan Bréchignac. In the near future, our agency will be happy to help Chinese audiences discover a fascinating chapter in the history of French painting: the invention of landscape in 19th-century painting, from Corot to the Impressionists.

So, how can we reconcile more responsible practices while maintaining artistic and cultural dialogue, which is all the more fruitful on this subject as French and Chinese art have a completely different relationship with nature?

This is a challenge for the coming years, to be seen as a constraint capable of stimulating the creation of alternative modes of creation, production and distribution. Drawing inspiration from the above-mentioned initiatives, we need to be careful to avoid off-ground activities at all costs, and to foster relationships with the local context and audience. Encourage artists’ residencies, so that the short exhibition period can be extended by a deeper encounter with the context in which the work is received. Mutualize the ecological cost of showing a collection of works from afar, by organizing tours over several months, on a national or regional scale. Take advantage of local resources available for the creation and production of works, with the chance that these may open up new creative or technical horizons. Call on experts to monitor and measure the environmental impact of a project. Pool resources and best practices among local players. Set up workshops with artists to raise public awareness of environmental issues. Up to 120 years!