Water and mountain

“What does it represent?” A stupid question.
“A landscape, as I see it.” A kind response.
You can sense that
Jean Cabane's paintings are landscapes. They are the places of a French poet painter living in Hoi An, Vietnam. He walks between the sea and the rice paddies and draws what he sees as he sees it.
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His work, painted with natural pigments on rice paper, resembles what a haiku would look like if it were drawn. A shanshui of the Chinese tradition, a landscape. And it isn't superfluous to note that the term landscape in Chinese is made up of the union of the two characters for mountain, shan, and water, shui. The Asian aesthetic, harmonised in Jean with the genetic imprinting of his native Provence, highlights not so much the cognitive aspect as the communication of emotions.
I know all of this. So why ask such a stupid question?
Probably because it is hard to escape the desire to place, define or nail down something that is altogether more subtle. It is as if I couldn't trust myself.
On the other hand, thinking back to my meeting with Cabane, whose life shares a few coincidences and experiences with my own, I realised that the shanshui, or landscape, in his composition of water and land, sea and mountain, or forest, has become the scenario in which I operate physically and mentally, where I search for ideas for articles, where the stories I should be telling are set.
Such as the stories of the monks I am following between north-east Thailand and the mountains of the southern Shan, in Burma. The stories of ghost ships in the Gulf of Thailand or of those tackling the waters of the South China Sea, with its islands, islets and rocks. The stories of deviations and digressions from those paths, with quiet moments spent on deserted beaches near the base and port of Cam Ranh, or the nimitti, the hallucinations of meditation, that set off anxiety and panic attacks.
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Moving confusedly around this landscape, between monks, archaeologists and poets, mysterious and menacing ships, ruins and wreckage, I look for the story within the stories.
I keep asking myself the same stupid question: “What does it represent?”
But I don't yet have the courage or the ability to respond: “A landscape, as I see it.”
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