/ Jean Claude Wouters：Light of Void

「Life taught me dance, so I just follow life.」
— Jean Claude Wouters

Born in Belgium in 1956, Jean-Claude Wouters has been exploring various continents through his career, in search of a certain universality in the world his art aims to find out and highlight. Paris, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, are the main spaces where he has developed a very singular art practice, mixing successively and sometime simultaneously, drawing, painting, ballet dancing (he was a dancer of the legendary Béjard Ballet), filmmaking, performance, and photography. Influenced in his childhood by the diversity of art exploration of artists such as Yves Klein, going from performance to painting to mix both practices, Wouters followed his own itinerary, practicing each art medium as a chapter of a sole book of life.

❝ Using photography as a painter

And doing everything as a dancer

To drift like clouds
And flow like water

Life taught me dance

So I just follow life❞

— Jean Claude Wouters, 2022


(Left) CRINOLINE MAN, Jean Claude Wouters, LACMA, 2011 ／ (Right) Cameras of the artist.
Courtesy of the artist.

The title of the current exhibition Light of Void, includes purposely the word “light”. It is presently this special light Wouters’ works speak about. “I draw with light, I don’t make a copy of reality”, Wouters says. In japanese photography is translated by shashin, two ideograms meaning copy/reality. In most occasions, photography is used as “a copy of reality”, rather than "drawing with light". I prefer to think of the photography of the beginnings, in the XIX century, with its special painting feeling.” All the technics Wouters use are very traditional photographic ones and it is a fact that most of them are disappearing quickly pushed out by the new digital technology for photography. In a few years from now, Wouters might not be able to create more the art pieces he makes today that we can see in this current exhibition, while the unique gelatin silver print he uses has already became difficult to find. We won’t see anywhere else such a refined nuance of greys like in Wouters’ work– which are never black and white but merely a unique greyish.



Lee Bauwens Gallery Brussels，2018
Courtesy of the artist.


Clouds & Moon, 3 traditional Chinese landscape


❝ If we look at a mountain for example,
we can of course,
consider it from an objective angle,
analyze it scientifically,
bring it into categories of discourse.
But in C’han (Zen) one becomes the mountain.
Or we identify with the flower,
with the water that keeps the flower alive.
To become the mountain, the flower, the water, the cloud. ❞

— Taisen Deshimaru(1914-1982), Soto Zen Sensei, Japan

In the traditional Chinese art history, it is a fact that landscape has been explored through the discourse of language and materiality, while remaining always partly mysterious. The Franco- Chinese Poet and Philosopher François Cheng, in his essay, Vide et Plein (Void and Full), questions the Chinese pictural art tradition from the concept of Void. The Philosopher explains: “ In the artistic field, even without a thorough artistic knowledge, a Chinese, whether artist or simple amateur, intuitively accepts the Void as a basic principle (...). It is in painting that the Void manifests itself most visibly and fully. In some Sung and Yuan paintings, we see that the Void (unpainted space) occupies up to two-thirds of the canvas. In front of such paintings, even an innocent spectator feels confusedly that the Void is not an inert presence and that it is traversed by breaths connecting the visible world to an invisible world.”


Wouters’ imaginary landscapes, deeply inspired by this philosophy, his art and search of a new medium of creation aimed to question through his visual experiments the mystery of the cosmos, the power of the Void to lighten the universe. He uses the simplest photographic techniques, to create evocative images that explore the photographic medium, (gelatine film and paper with silver sensitive grains, revealed by light), and express the transience of life. Here we see clouds, a moon reflecting on a lake, and three historic masterpieces of Chinese painting. All subjects reflecting the way of Chan (zen) that dictate the practice of Wouters. Photography here is encapsulating light on the paper surface. Photography becomes the medium of time. Wouters avoids modern technology from the photographic process to come back to a artistic handmade production of images – including natural light, negative black and white 120 film, traditional photographic paper, unique prints.


(Left)《The Clouds-Yen Houei-441-15》, Jean Claude Wouters, 2021　／　(Right) 《The Moon-Yen Houei-459-0》, Jean Claude Wouters, 2021
Courtesy of the artist.

“When the painting does not aim to be a simple aesthetic object; it tends to become a microcosm recreating, like the macrocosm, an open space where real life is possible.” Wouters likes to remember this quote by a Chinese painter, poet and philosopher Wang Wei. One could say Asia is the center of the imaginary world of Wouters. What Wouters interprets in Wang Wei quote is the possibility of art to form a new space, a new world. However, the Wang Wei’s painting Wouters found in a book is not from the VIIIth century – as most of Wang Wei paintings disappeared and are known through copies of it. In Arthur Danto’s book Beyond the Brillo box, has a very interesting chapter on this particular historic Chinese phenomenon for an artist to paint a famous painting from the past, from seeing it and remembering, or just by a description from others.

Wouters was very interested in the phenomenon, it highlights also the deep meaning of Wouters’ own personal practice of rephotographing a work. Wouters explains with the modesty which characterizes the artist. “I know my position, so I use photography, my medium, and I don’t pretend to make a Chinese painting.” As a matter of fact, those three images of ancient paintings become, through the process of rephotographing, three other images, rather abstract. “Light traces, like clouds, and like my own paintings”, the artist says.


《Water Fall-Wang Wei-441-09》, Jean Claude Wouters, 2021
Courtesy of the artist.

The China Sea (2006)

It is a work created after a Japanese post card from 1916, a landscape of more than 100 years old, not existing as such anymore. Wouters’ works questions the concept of time. For an artist using photography, time is part of the medium of creation.

“There is much to say about time, Wouters says; in our modern world we have lost its sense, like for example saying Time flies. No, time doesn’t fly. Dogen, who brought C’han (zen) philosophy to Japan from China in the XIIIth Century, explained this statement in a text entitled Uji, in his book The Shobogenzo (being time in English). It expresses how time and being are deeply linked, and that there is no being without time.”

However, if Wouters is inspired by a philosophic background, the viewer doesn’t have to search a special message in his China sea but merely a visual expression: there is a front light, that come from the sky, and its reflection in the water expresses so much. “When I look at it, my eyes dwell into the image”, says the artist.




《China Sea-73-12》, Jean Claude Wouters, 2007
Courtesy of the artist.


《Cosmogony(Hokusai Wave)-365-11》, Jean Claude Wouters, 2009
Courtesy of the artist.

Portrait & Planet

We see a portrait and a planet that echoes the portrait, by its form and uniqueness. A planet as a portrait. Wouters makes portraits on demand. The rare paradox of his portraits is that while each portrait brings to life the particularity and uniqueness of each sitter, at the same time, they all look alike, as if in life, what defines each one of us, is as well what bound us all, as a humanity. Wouters’ unique process of photographing and rephotographing strips his portraits of excessive descriptive detail. The final print holds only the slightest trace, suggesting at first a nearly pure abstraction. But slowly, a luminous apparition emerges, ethereal and intensely present.


(Left)《Portrait-453-16》, Jean Claude Wouters, 2021　／　(Right) 《Full Moon-256-10》, Jean Claude Wouters, 2010
Courtesy of the artist.


Paintings & Photo paintings

Jean Claude Wouters is acknowledged for the multifaceted nature of his art, film, performance, photography, painting. His practice is the opportunity to reflect on what is the intrinsic nature of each medium, expressing it in an unconventional manner. In his quest, the medium, its expression and what it expresses being the same. Wouters start with a simple question: what is the fundamental of a painting? Pigments on fabric, stretched on a wooden frame. No representation, no abstraction, just the plain medium. Limiting his expression to the minimum, using the simplest means and wanting to disappear behind the paint object, he let the surface reveal itself, express space and its surrounding, this particular void that Chan Master painters refer too in their masterpieces. It is common to say “less is more”, but for Wouters, less is less, and that is what makes it so precious.



《Moon on the Lake-457-01》, Jean Claude Wouters, 2009
Courtesy of the artist.


《Clouds 2-256-09》, Jean Claude Wouters, 2009
Courtesy of the artist.

Next to the photographs, the canvases appear as another kind of photographic layer, in the sense the artist is still painting with light on those canvases. One can feel that the concept of Void is for the artist a fulfilled visual space.


(Left)《#56-2018》, Jean Claude Wouters, 2018　／　(Right) 《#57-2018》, Jean Claude Wouters, 2018
Courtesy of the artist.