‘By examining the impossibility of the nude in the Chinese tradition, François Jullien brings to light the unexamined conditions of possibility of our own philosophical and cultural choices’. – Arnold Davidson
‘Starting from the puzzle constituted by the absence of the nude in Chinese art… Jullien succeeds in shedding a fascinating light upon what this contradiction tells us about that which distinguishes two views of man and two understandings of the world… Those who have made an effort to take ‘the Chinese detour’ can no longer contemplate with the same eyes the nudes they admire in museums or in modern photography’. – Les Echos, on the French edition
‘the nude we look at with the museumgoer’s jager eye springs out as a revealing element, illuminating the European tradition of art from the Greeks to our own day, from sculpture to painting and on to photography, and also disclosing how thought shaper our culture. The nude is a paradigm of what the “West” consists of in cultural terms, and brings to light the stances that originally underpinned our philosophy.’
‘Yet Greek nude statuary began with Apollo, and the male nude dominated European painting until the seventeenth century. Does this reflect a change of mores or of medium? Could it be that photography is more closely related to the idea of desire and the depiction of woman as a sexual object? Or is it that the body of Eve is more perfect than Adam’s – in other words, that hers is closer to “Form” than his? From the photographic standpoint at least, the male genital apparatus, in particular, seems to have barely progressed beyond the inchoate, as though leftover from some earlier era. It might perhaps lend itself to sculpture, and it may even be paintable, but it is not photographable, unless with the express design of underlining its nakedness. This would be borne out by its opposite, the female breast, which is at once plenitude and pure curve, the perfect conjunction – the Greeks would say- of “matter” and “form”. Or could it be that on film, the contrast between skin texture and tufted hair, the infinitely smooth and the hirsute, makes the female nude more unadulteratedly nude than that of the male, a kind of superlative nude even more nude than he would be?’
‘It can be said that if there is a single revealing tait of the Western intellectual adventure, both aesthetic and theoretical, one that is characteristic in terms of its own natural choices, is certainly the nude. […] That nudes appear in sculpture, painting, and photography undeniably denotes the existence of a tradition. […] The nude: there is, and can only be, one nude – precisely because it is nude, i its “naked” state, with no adjuncts, stripped totally bare. Proportions and poses can be tirelessly and methodically changed- the cleavage between the breasts reduced to a narrow line or spread wide as a plain; the figures themselves ascetic and bony as Gothic vaults, or plump, Rubenesque -but they are all nudes. The nude maintains its coherence and its autonomy, not through the aesthetic or plastic treatment it undergoes, since this can vary in the extreme, but by virtue of what has always been sought in it – which I call here the essence.’
‘whatever new developments may occur in genre, style, or medium, they are all measured against the nude; and in European history, our conception of “humanism” undoubtedly draws its pertinence from the nude and from what it implicitly, but therefore all the more radically, brings into play at the juncture between natural and the ideological. This pertinence derives from the idea of making man’s only reality the model of reality itself in its most extreme perfection. Whence European culture’s continued attachment to the nude: European art was fixated on the nude, just as its philosophy was fixated on the true. The nude was held to be formative in the teaching of art in the same way that logic was in philosophy.’
‘The existence of the nude is made possible primarily by what, with the Greeks, we came to understand by “form”: a form that functions as a model, whose background is often mathematized and geometrized, and takes on the value of an ideal as it fixes an identity of essence (the eidos)- this is what was consecrated by the nude. Plotinus recognizes that “there is in nature a rational principle (logos) which is the model of beauty i the body” (Enneads), although he goes on to express a preference for the rational principle in the soul. In other words, there is an “archetype” of bodily beauty that is its true form, and which artists strive to achieve.’
‘It follows that the impossibility of the nude in China is primarily attributable to its lack of ontological status there: what remains, therefore, is either the flesh (Chinese eroticism) or indecent nakedness. The bedrock of Being that the nude has been founded on since the times of the Greeks is “missing”.
The notion of the human body is also in question, and here the gap is no less marked. In the West, the notion that prevailed is that of an anatomical body consisting of a flesh-covered skeleton whose every muscle, tendon, ligament, and so forth is susceptible to analysis, deconstruction, and dissection (as evidenced by art school teaching on the nude, or painters’ preparatory drawings). However, for a very long time the internal function of circulation and exchange remained a matter of secondary importance- if it was perceived at all. But it was this anatomical analysis that enabled the meticulous imitation from which the nude derives, to the point where in Europe, even in the representation of clothed figures, these were first drawn as nudes. In China, on the other hand, the body is viewed from the standpoint of “energy”, not anatomy: it is perceived in a global, organic way that preserves its life-ensuring functional capacity. The body is conceived of in exact correspondence to the external world, with which it is in permanent communication. It is itself a universe that is both closed and open, permeated by breaths flowing through a system of channels or “meridians” which run through the body and circulate vitality. The body is comparable to a large bag (oval) inside which, as in the rest of the world, ceaseless transmutations take place.’
‘The reason why anatomy- which is the basis for the nude- remained so unelaborated in China, despite its extremely refined figurative art, is that there the human body did not acquire the status of an object, as is called for by the nude. The experience of the body was above all that of one’s own body as sensed internally. ‘
‘The question can no longer be avoided as to whether artists and aesthetes in China ever sought the Beautiful. The issue is inescapable if it is true that, until modern times at least, in Western culture, the notion of the Beautiful remained linked to ideal Form and that this is what the nude aims to embody. However, on reading Chinese treatises on aesthetics it becomes clear that priority is given to the resonances of the figuration (qiyun), the radiance that emanates from it (shencai), and the atmosphere it diffuses (fengshen).’
‘The nude persistently question our thinking about “form,” “ideal” or “beauty”.’
‘The human figure should be painted in harmony with the world, immersed and integrated into it’
‘In China, the human body is perceived in quite a different way. This is undoubtedly one of the most radical points of divergence between Chinese thought and our own. Anatomy has been of very little interest to the Chinese, who hardy explored the fields. They pay less attention to the identity and specificity of morphological components (organs, muscles, tendons, ligaments, and so on) than to the quality of the exchanges between “outside” and “inside”, which ensure the vitality of the body as a whole. This explains why they see o problem in the unclothed body being summarily represented like a sack.
