Corps Céleste

20 November 2025 – 17 January 2026

Opening 20 November 2025 from 6pm

Conversation 29 November 2025 at 5pm

Artist
Zhao Duan

Curator
Jens Hauser

Growing traces – Coloured imprints

Jens Hauser

Is he really lying down, or is he already getting up? His imposing body, almost six metres, does not seem destined to adopt a horizontal posture, so much so that his beautiful and elegant stature, with its stylish contours, albeit fragmented, aspires to an upright serenity. Yet it is this reclining Vishnu, the Hindu protector god in its 11th-century sculptural representation, a masterpiece of Khmer art, that Zhao Duan has chosen to welcome her guests, the one who ‘lets his gaze hover, even with his eyes closed, while the world collapses’. Inspired by the presence of this colossal bronze Vishnu in the Musée Guimet of Asian arts in Paris, the artist walked the length and breadth of the sculpture of the god reclining on the Ocean of Eternity in order to create her drawing in the espace temps gallery: nomen est omen, since in this durational performance it is time that unfolds in space. On a large sheet of paper hung horizontally on the wall, Zhao Duan draws the silhouette of the giant, which evokes the myth of the creation of the world, in a single stroke but successively with different coloured pencils. Always starting with dark colours and gradually shifting to lighter shades, this same line gradually becomes not only form but even surface, thus thwarting the doctrines of Western art history since the Renaissance, which have disputed the supposed superiority of either line or colour.

But it is in many other respects that Zhao Duan’s practice transforms the espace temps into what we might be tempted to call a “corridor for the reconciliation of opposites”. The body of work by the French-aculturated Chinese performer brings into dialectical oscillation cultural codes, conceptual dualities and supposedly opposing materials and media. Antipodes such as process/object, ephemeral/durable, soft/hard, flexible/rigid, colour/black and white, point/line, simultaneity/linearity, silhouette/surface, trace/imprint, horizontal/vertical, and Western/Eastern writing are overcome. Apparent contradictions give rise to a principle of union between opposites. So, in the artist’s latest series, Corps Céleste refers, on the one hand, to a vertical astronomical logic and an imaginary cosmology of stars, asteroids, comets, planets, clouds of gas etc. ; and, on the other, to the very down-to-earth gesture of drawing on paper, walking horizontally, a continuous line of growth during the months of pregnancy preceding the birth of her son, Célestin. In these drawings, called Corps en synchronie, the movements of the maternal body and the metamorphosis of a growing body merge, each time with two complementary gestures: one physiological and rectilinear, evoking germination as if from the ground to the sky, then another, psychological and undulating, transposing the exploratory gaze of a world to be discovered, following the example of her ocular saccades, those rapid and precise eye movements that scan the visual field of an environment in order to find one’s bearings cognitively. From this single, continuous line, a voluminous figure gradually emerges that can be read as feminine, while at the same time exceeding the dimensions of the human body. The direction of the hanging also remains deliberately indeterminate. Horizontally, it appears above all as a record of the performative gesture, vertically as a motif with anthropomorphic contours – the two readings also echoing the different meanings and perceptions of writing: Western, from left to right, and Eastern, from top to bottom.

The colours, for their part, are not intended to evoke cultural connotations and are referenced merely through the serial numbers of the pencil manufacturers used in the title of each drawing,, like abstract spatial coordinates. It is as if Zhao Duan deliberately wanted to ignore trans-historical Western quarrels, with their preference either for colorito – the priority given to the mastery of coloured tones in the painting process, attributed to Venetian artists – or for disegno – the primordial importance given first and foremost to a structure, to a drawing or project with clear contours, according to the Florentine vision. While the artist says to be impressed and fascinated, very early in her career, by Pablo Picasso’s ability to capture the essence of a motif in a single fluid line, or by gestural drawings “in the air” with a luminous pencil and fixed in time by photographic techniques, she also knows how to transform a single line into something resembling a densely coloured surface, as for example in her series Le temps condensé, a kind of “literal trompe l’oeil” for the viewer.　In a mischievous way, the artists refers us back to the polysemy contained in the Mandarin term画 [huà] which can mean both the verb and the substantive of“drawing and painting”, as well as to the action画画 [huà huà] which can indifferently have the meaning of “drawing the drawing”, “painting the painting”, or even more generally of “making the artwork”.

What applies to motifs and forms also applies to the materials and media Zhao Duan uses. As if she wanted to constantly change the states of physical aggregates, she likes to play with the mutability of things that seem sometimes soft and sometimes hard, sometimes rigid and sometimes supple, whether they are pencils or brushes, or the various material supports she uses. For example, in her performance Le temps d’un crayon, the artist stages the variable duration it takes to produce a drawing on paper by going back and forth with a hand-held grey pencil, and demonstrates its lifespan according to the grade of hardness of the lead. The softest 8B pencil takes 1 hour 31 minutes and 56 seconds to disappear, the medium HB pencil 10 hours 34 minutes and 28 seconds, while the hardest 6H pencil takes 56 hours 17 minutes and 43 seconds, and it is the video recording that becomes the guardian of the performative act. In contrast, in her most recent coloured drawings in the series Corps en synchronie, the artist deliberately deprives the viewer of any visual trace of the moment when the gesture is inscribed in time, and chooses to document the becoming of the ever-growing silhouette solely through sound recordings of the pencils moving across the paper. Instead of showing us this process at a glance, here we listen to the friction in the form of the stretched, linear temporality of the drawing process that we are supposed to follow for long minutes, as an effort at empathetic co-corporality.

Elsewhere, Zhao Duan alternates the materiality of the supports onto which her traces or imprints are inscribed. For the small formats in the Corps en synchronie series, she exchanges the suppleness, fragility and opacity of white paper for the rigidity, resistance and transparency of plexiglas. As a result, the lines of germination seem to float “in the air”, like Picasso’s light pencil lines, but are engraved as if made up of a succession of jerky dots in this hard material… and so remind us of the classic tension, still in the history of Western art, between the dot and the line. But while Vassily Kandinsky, in Point and Line on a Plan published in 1926, wrote that the line ‘is the trace of the point in movement’, here it is the ‘point-line’ that unites opposites again, serving more to record a performative trajectory than to delimit surfaces. The tracing of a body in action or in movement, in a random and uncontrolled way, under the influence of forces that sometimes escape it, is a constant in Zhao Duan’s work, even since her studies at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse. For De Esquirol à Eisenhower, a daily bus journey becomes a pretext for letting a pencil on a notebook record and transpose the vehicle’s vibrations, sudden stops and holes in the pavement in the manner of a human seismograph. Despite the routine nature of the route, it is the wide variation in jostling that is captured as an indexical sign. It is chance that makes the drawing.

However, it is the conscious, conceptual use of materialities of opposing qualities that determines whether a cultural technique as ancient and transcultural as the imprint reveals more or fewer lines, dots or “white” areas on the chosen support. And Zhao Duan chooses them and subtly varies them according to the societal circumstances in which she provokes her encounters, touches and consequent imprints. For example, the individual co-creative encounters entitled intitulées Main dans la main and Cent titres both involve a face-to-face, hand-in-hand situation with another person, in whose palm the artist first creates a portrait in oil paint, which is then transferred as an imprint onto a support, playing on the destabilisation of the ephemeral/durable dualism. And it’s the play with soft/hard and flexible/rigid oppositions that makes all the difference. The first, Main dans la main, involves meetings in nursing homes with frail elderly people, with the artist holding their hand, drawing their portrait and recording their conversation, from which words are extracted to accompany these portraits made by contact images. Here, the poetry and melancholy result from the use of paper handkerchiefs that are usually thrown away once used. The ephemeral encounter finds its counterpart in the even more ephemeral imprint in the paper handkerchief, which is as disposable and as it is foldable as such perfectly fits the shape of the hand to capture and render the slightest details of the epidermis, the ridges of the papillae, the folds and ramifications, the lines like imprints of time, and further amplified by the folds of the handkerchief itself. In contrast, while the set-up for the second performance, Cent titres, remains initially unchanged, it is the context of the Covid-19 crisis, with its strict confinements, that turns the processual context on its head, forcing the hundred subjects taking part in the performance to wear masks while their portraits are being made, resulting in mouthless figures, as mute as they were perforated, oscillating between disturbing anonymity and tactile individuality, and whose imprint was then transferred to Plexiglas – the emblematic material of the Covid-19 period, both protecting and isolating people in these moments of social distress. But the use of plexiglas, as a particularly rigid medium, has yet another intended effect, that of a second “amputation” when the oil portrait in the palm of the hand is transferred to this material, which in the past was used mainly in art to protect works, not people, from unwanted contact.

It is in the detailed exploration of these paradoxes that lies one of the major strengths of Zhao Duan’s artistic work – and in the portfolio of an artist like her the genre of the self-portrait should not be lacking. Thus, it was in an early, autobiographical piece, 赵端 ZHAO Duan, that plexiglas first made its appearance in the form of coloured imprints of the skin of all her own body parts offered for sale, like a complex, scattered geography printed here and there on flat sheets of plexiglas. Here, at espace temps, these horizontal prints are stacked vertically like a pedestal… a change of order and orientation again, a “conciliation of opposites” never comes alone with Zhao Duan.

Artiste

Zhao Duan

Born in 1981 in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, graduated from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse in France in 2010. She currently works and lives in Paris and Noisy-le-Sec.

ZHAO Duan’s artistic approach revolves around the notions of touch and experience. She employs a variety of mediums to explore and examine the triadic interplay among the body, action, and time. She favors a method of recording that she calls “imprints” to connect action and painting. Through simplified and repetitive movements, she aims to leave behind evocative makes and traces.

In 2012, ZHAO Duan was awarded the Michel Journiac Prize in France. Her works are held in collections by numerous private and public institutions and have been widely exhibited throughout France and abroad, including the Museum of Hunting and Nature in Paris, the Mac Val Contemporary Art Museum in Paris, the Ming Contemporary Art Museum in Shanghai, WU Space in Shenyang, and the Museum Ludwig in Germany, among others.

Curateur

Jens Hauser

Is a media studies researcher, writer and curator who analyses the interactions between art and technology. Based in Paris, he is currently a researcher at University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion and a distinguished faculty member in the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University, where he co-directs the BRIDGE artist residency programme. Most recently, he has been a professor of art history at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

At the intersection of art history and epistemology, Hauser has developed a theory of biomediality as part of his doctorate at the Ruhr University in Bochum. He also holds a degree in scientific and technical journalism from the Université François Rabelais in Tours. As a curator, Jens Hauser has organised around thirty exhibitions and festivals worldwide.