When I am asked why I paint, I reply that art is part of the process of life. It comes from this process and goes back to it.

Since childhood, I have been influenced by my love for the art of emblems and seals. I am originally from China, from the region of Zhejiang and more precisely from the district called Qinglin, whose rocks are well-known as being one of the four best stones for making seals.

In 1983, I settled in Paris to do business, and I brought my passions there with me in my suitcases. Photographing collecting and visiting museums and exhibitions are essential elements of my life.

The artistic explorations of the great painters in the West and the East are deeply embedded within me. Masters like Fan Kuan, Ma Yuan, Zhang Dagian and Lu Yanshad illustrate the quintessence of the Chinese art of landscaping in which the aestheticism of the emptiness and of the fullness, as well as the mastery of the brush strokes, enable us to feel that there is within each being the frailty of the mountains and the strength of little rivers. In the West, it was Cézanne, Matisse Zao Wou-ki and Gerhard Richter who shattered the conventions, and who set off in search of true nature, and thus ventured forth into the field of self-expression.

Living in Europe is an extra part of life. My knowledge and my imagination have been enriched by that, and art provides a huge space in which to blossom. Artistic creation is a rigorous and temporal exploration, the expression of the artist’s own nature. My paintings are emanations of my photographs, black and white becoming multicolored. In Paris, the influence of Western artistic ideas, intermingled with my enthusiasm and my energy, the vigor of calligraphy, the structure of the Chinese seals and the pictorial layout of the photograph’s composition, have created the symphony which inhabits my paintings. They are the expression of the fusion of cultures and of my love for humanity The emotions borne from contemplation can be expressed via painting. Thanks to a fertile imagination it allows for the passage from visual perception to the artistic representation of nature’s perpetual motions. According to this alchemy before the conditions are reunited, while there is still no catalyst to make the chemistry operate, at this moment, it is possible to construct an original pictorial language…

Maxime Zhang Workshop
54 Rue Sedaine
75011 Paris