On August 10, 2025, taking Professor Benoît Vermander’s recent exhibition Transmission and Translation: Ink Works by Benoît Vermander as an opening point, five speakers engaged in a profound discussion on the lecture theme On the Translatability of Painting. Can painting truly be translated? Does it form a grammar or a constructed language? Does its universal communicability arise from the artist’s intention or from aesthetic codes? Within the intensifying dynamics of cross-cultural translation where critique descends and boundaries blur, how might one disentangle the interwoven or conflicting notions of “translation,” “recreation,” and “appropriation”? And how might one distinguish the interactions and correspondences between artworks and their accompanying words? Continuing the French lineage stemming from Henri Michaux, Professor Vermander offers answers through three decades of practice in Chinese traditional ink painting.
Professor Huang Bei began with the topic of The Man of Ink: Henri Michaux’s Chinese Ink Language, tracing French artists’ engagement with Chinese ink painting back to Michaux himself. She outlined three dimensions of translation: between image and text, between the inner and the outer, and between East and West. Michaux’s Chinese ink works, she argued, originate from his search for symbols capable of expressing the inner language, in resistance of the “practicality, referentiality, and organization” of verbal language. The use of Chinese painting brush and ink mediates between the inner and the outer, so that the movements of the soul would surface upon paper, emerging as small dancing figures. His 1950 work Mouvements marks the beginning of this ink practice. These humanoid symbols hovering between writing and painting constitute the essential semiotic symbolic basis of Michaux’s expressive language. His paintings “always bear the shape of the human”, for it is inseparable from his individual existential predicament. In the organization of pictorial space, the narrative imagery of ink paintings translates the artist’s inner world. The corporeality of Chinese brushwork makes the act of creation itself therapeutic, gradually shaping on paper a new state of life.
Professor Lu Mingjun, in Cave Ink and Pattern Recognition, reviewed Professor Vermander’s art career. He dug into the art-historical roots and contemporary significance of his paintings through the lens of Chinese art history since the middle of twentieth-century and the history of East–West artistic exchange. On one hand, Professor Vermander emphasizes the Chinese lineage of ink. On the other, through his horizontality in floor-spreading gestures, he “dismantles the dogma of studio” and returns to rituals and the prehistoric caves of wilderness. In contrast to the “upright, hierarchical, and transcendental” verticality, horizontality summons the “flattened, scattered, and poured-out” formlessness and beastliness. Professor Lu observed that Vermander inherits the “reformed tradition of Chinese painting” while engaging in a spiritual and ritualistic rendering. His ontological symbols, following the logic of the Rorschach inkblot test, invite a “family resemblance” mode of pattern recognition.
Artist Lu Pingyuan, drawing from his own practice, explored, under the theme “Faith in the Medium,” how myth, ritual, and narrative are translated, revived, and reborn through new media within modern experience. Using three groups of works, Theophany, Semi-Auto Wandering Gods, and Best of the Best Draw, Lu aimed to integrate surreal narratives into conceptual art by employing artificial intelligence, text, installation, video, and painting as the dual media of generation and communion. Following the model of Andersen’s paper-cut templates—first created, then stitched, decorated and rewritten—he probes how the spirit of contemporary times manifests and translates itself through art through establishing a recursive interaction between the original design and artificial intelligence. He reconstituted gods and myths with personal and historical experience so as to restore the potential for spiritual connection between human and cosmos.
Following Benjamin’s reflections on image, Deng Anqi examined the legitimacy of image translation in The Translatability of the Image: From Images Reading to Imagelessness. Based on communicability, criticizability, reproducibility and quotability, visual works “by their very nature permit and even demand (verlangen) translation.” Unlike Moholy-Nagy’s prediction that images would replace words, Benjamin’s concept of caption (Beschriftung) opens to viewers a path toward understanding the work and reveals the “unmetaphorical objectivity” (unmetaphorischer Sachlichkeit) underlying visual form. Thus, the situation of life’s indebtedness (Schuldzusammenhang) becomes textualized, reaching a kind of “literacy”. Concluding with Benjamin’s critical retelling of the legend “Wu Daozi Enters the Painting,” Deng sketched the virtual motion of “entering and exiting the image”: the image of God may still dwell in invisible light, forever separated from the viewer by the distance of the virtual, the state of Imagelessness.
In the closing lecture Translating Ink Painting, Professor Benoît Vermander began frankly with Cézanne’s statement “I will tell it to you” on the truth of painting, to reveal the necessity of pictorial language. Grounded in cultural tradition, stylistic symbolism, compositional convention, and creative material, the pictorial language unfolds across different scales of narration. Yet Professor Vermander also emphasized the distinction between painting and verbal language: the former is immediate and non-linear, an analysis following a quick grasp of the whole, while the latter is sequential and synthetic. And once philosophy turns to describing phenomena and reflecting on how they appear to perception, it enters the realm of painting as well. On artistic creation, Professor Vermander remains guided by a dual calling: the sensibility of the French painting tradition and the inner structure of Chinese ink practice, each longing for and invoking the other’s translation. “Every creative artwork aspires someday to be translated. Translation is transformation, and transformation ensures the endurance of essence. Translation allows the work to live on. We need to be translated by the Other and we also need to be translated into a new existence, for only thus can vitality truly persist and regenerate.”
“Translation equals creation. It equals life.” With this, Professor Vermander summed up his artistic philosophy. Through translation, art and artist transcend time and boundary, weaving each other into the inner image of life and attaining a renewed immortality. “Creation is the resistance to entropy, to death. It translates past insight and reality into new expressions of life. Ultimately, life is translation, and translation is life.”
