Huang Hankang: I didn’t want to be a French artist in Paris, nor a Chinese artist in China — that would impose a kind of self-limiting cultural perspective. I originally chose to study at the École des Beaux-Arts de Cergy in Paris and lived in the Marais district for eight years, mainly to see exhibitions. At the same time, I wanted to bring my experiences from China to France and observe: how does the cultural system that dominates contemporary society operate? This observation also helped me reflect on the contemporary trajectory of Chinese culture. The reason I later left France was partly because I felt I had gained a clearer understanding of how the modern-to-contemporary cultural system works, so my interest in the city waned. Another practical reason was that certain local conditions in France limited my creative practice. In recent years, besides painting, I’ve been doing sculpture and installation. Local technicians and material suppliers in France usually cater to larger projects. If an artist wants to create something small, you have to go to many places and spend a lot of energy getting someone to make it. In this regard, China offers more convenient conditions.

Zhao Yu: Like Hankang, I find the cultural atmosphere in France very important. Here, art is integrated into everyday life. Even if people aren’t art professionals, many will spend weekends visiting exhibitions with their families, sometimes even pushing strollers — it’s as casual and frequent as going to an amusement park or seeing a movie. In China, although more people are visiting exhibitions nowadays, art is still extremely niche within the larger social system.

Liu Guangli: Indeed, France has far richer cultural resources compared to China. One of the main reasons I stayed in France was for my child’s education. Also, unlike Hankang’s situation, French art institutions offer better learning environments and resources for artists like me who work primarily with video and digital media. The context here is slightly more mature than in China. Yet, as an artist, it’s difficult for me to completely detach from my native language structure in thought and creation. That’s why I’ve maintained a back-and-forth life between China and France over the years — living, observing, conducting reflective research, and then creating.

Han Qian: Yes, that’s what I thought when I was studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but now I don’t think so anymore. Back then, international flights were more convenient than they are now, and the school offered a sort of utopian atmosphere — French art schools usually don’t tell students how to survive after leaving. At the time, I thought I could shuttle between the two countries partly because my mother was still supporting me financially. But after the pandemic, I started to feel that looking at China from Paris is a rather absurd perspective. Even though I never fully felt at home in either place, I wondered: during my years of studying abroad, in this decade where I’ve lost touch with China, how could I talk about China while living in Europe? Eventually, I became convinced that my observation and creation had to return to China; I had to be present. China’s reality cannot exist only in my imagination.

Li Yuhang: Being “present” is also crucial for my research and creative work. My anthropological and artistic fieldwork now takes place in the Sanjiangyuan region of China. I’m still doing my PhD in France, so I have time to decide whether I’ll return permanently. But during this recent trip back to China, I felt that neither my family space nor the broader social environment could give me enough security. I think if I want to continue the research and art I aim to pursue, I’ll likely keep moving between China and France.

Wang Yuyan: I often reflect on this idea of “being present.” I seem to always exist in an exceptional, almost guerrilla-like state — neither fully living in China nor settled in France. Whenever I return to China, it’s mostly for work, leaving little time for creation to grow naturally from local soil. I feel that working with video itself is an act of confronting reality. I try to construct perception, emotion, and memory through editing, so the images can retain their sense of reality and tension in a more sensorial way. Although my work often involves fieldwork or documentation, approaching reality in this “parachute-in” manner always makes me feel somewhat disconnected from time and space. Yet this sense of detachment and uncertainty isn’t necessarily negative, especially today. Artistic creation isn’t just a reflection of reality; it becomes part of the fragmented, complex reality itself. In fact, it allows me to maintain a constantly questioning, adjusting, and synchronizing relationship with reality.

LEAP: I’m also curious about your experience, Yun Yao. You’re the only artist here who hasn’t studied in France. Why did you come to live and work in France, and what has the experience been like for you?

Zhang Yunyao: Everyone else had already studied or lived in France before the pandemic. For me, the decisive factor for staying in Paris was precisely the pandemic. In 2020, international flights were blocked, and I had no way to return to China. With the help of various friends, I found a way to stay. Before coming, I had already explored French culture and art to some extent and formed certain understandings — or you could even say misunderstandings. Once in Paris, I started visiting exhibitions, meeting local artists and curators, and in the process, I began questioning and gradually testing and adjusting those understandings. Later, I realized that when I pierced through the “window” to see the so-called truth, it sometimes felt less romantic or interesting than my earlier imagination. Those misunderstandings, though inaccurate, weren’t entirely wrong either; they were infused with my own subjective imagination. I often reflect on how my former self perceived these unverified ideas.

Han Qian: My experience is almost the reverse of Yun Yao’s. I went abroad around the age of 18, but before that, I had spent all 18 years in boarding school, almost completely cut off from real life in China. So I knew very little about my hometown, Wuhan, or the social realities most children encounter growing up. By “reverse,” I mean that many of my behaviors and ways of thinking were actually shaped in Europe. When I returned to China from France, it felt like I was relearning and re-understanding China. Many of my earlier misreadings and criticisms of China were actually based on a more complex reality that I couldn’t fully grasp while in Paris. Overall, I feel the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris helped me a lot. I remember when I first entered, a teacher asked me which contemporary artists I liked. I thought for a long time and couldn’t answer. The teacher suggested I spend more time in the library looking at art books. The school didn’t directly teach me what to do; its greatest value was in not forcing me to do anything. That tolerance allowed me to “waste time” without purpose, slowly thinking and experimenting. Of course, not everyone has this experience. Some French classmates in our studio were very proactive, but the system could also accommodate someone like me, who seemed distant within the school.

Liu Guangli: I completely agree with Han Qian. Good education isn’t about shaping you into something, but about giving you the possibility to become yourself, even to do seemingly “useless” things. On the other hand, my experience at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nice was less positive. The school seemed intent on imposing a particular aesthetic system and working method on me, which felt uncomfortable. Between 2014 and 2015, I began creating works related to video games. Some teachers didn’t understand this medium, or it wasn’t included in their framework of what could be considered art. But I didn’t agree with that; art shouldn’t be defined by academic systems, culture, or any framework. Later, at Le Fresnoy, the French national center for contemporary art and audiovisual research, and after becoming classmates with Yuyan, I encountered new working methods, like the process of making short films and learning about film festivals and the broader film industry. I instinctively began to realize that these so-called “mature systems” can be inherently delayed. Like any living organism, their primary goal is to preserve themselves rather than to take risks. Even systems that celebrate experimentation and avant-gardism inevitably lag behind. This educational experience allowed me to reflect on my relationship with various systems and the distance between them.

Huang Hankang: Like Guangli, I observed similar issues in the academy. The École de Cergy was established by the French government in 1977 to build a European contemporary art system as a counterbalance to the global influence of American contemporary art. France has long had excellent schools like the Paris Beaux-Arts, but at the time, art education there was relatively conservative. The Cergy school was founded to break away from this conservatism and promote multi-medium creation. While I was there, I worked in video and installation rather than painting. One day, three French students were painting in the studio when the director walked in and said, “You’d be better off painting at another school.” I was confused — wasn’t the school promoting multi-medium practice? Isn’t painting a medium? This made me realize that even though the school tried to overturn tradition, a degree of conservatism still existed.

Zhao Yu: I recently had a solo exhibition in Paris called Thin as Cicada Wings. It included elements of traditional Chinese medicine — for example, I used the imagery of cicadas, whose molted shells are important in Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Some viewers asked why I included TCM elements. I think the West has certain fixed ideas about aspects of China, like medicine or textiles, often linking them to a generalized “Chineseness.” In fact, I use cicadas to express vulnerability, but they also symbolize resistance to life. In this exhibition, I tried to explore the relationship between war and healing, and also to touch on universal human experiences. Interestingly, many ideas in French philosophy are essentially “Eastern” — for instance, Deleuze’s nomadic thinking resonates with Confucius’s idea of you yu yi (“learning many skills, not limited to one discipline”), and Schopenhauer was influenced by the I Ching, Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy, and Buddhism. These overlaps show that East and West are not entirely opposed; ideas flow between them.

Huang Hankang: It’s not just about incorporating Chinese elements — as Chinese artists, or really any international artist working in Europe, our creations inevitably mix elements or frameworks from both our own cultural systems and European ones. In Western contemporary art history, there’s the concept of the “readymade”; I think different cultures can also be treated as readymades and repurposed in creation. That’s part of my approach. Yet I do carry the burden of East Asian culture: East Asians tend to reflect deeply on themselves. As Confucius said, “I examine myself thrice daily.” After reflection, we look to other cultures for inspiration. Western contemporary art is slowly beginning to “self-reflect” and pay attention to Chinese or other non-Western creations, but there’s still a sense that they are the main actors in contemporary art — they sow, then see how the flowers grow outside — while the non-West becomes a supplementary source. It’s like saying, “What can ‘they’ gain from the systems ‘we’ invented?”

Liu Guangli: I think an artist can only observe sincerely the needs within their own practice. We choose our themes and media, but we can’t control the final reception. For example, when I applied for a project at the French National Film Board (CNC), the jurors liked it because it revealed facts they hadn’t known before. As someone living abroad, we are filtered by these institutions, but using their resources to realize our work sincerely can be positive. Sometimes, audiences ask sharp questions after screenings, like whether I must or should critique certain targets. Even though I don’t create from a political stance, once the work and its facts are viewed politically, I cannot control that interpretation.

Wang Yuyan: Living abroad, identity may not be central to creation, but it often forms an underlying tone. Every society has a delicate social texture and operating system, and working against this background requires an extra sensorial dimension. I find that video allows me to capture and express subtleties that are hard to convey in language — moments full of uncertainty and ambiguity — conveying sensory experience in ways that are difficult to quantify. In this process, I aim to avoid using identity as a starting point for a combative stance. Instead, I try to capture and present a more enduring driving force of life and production, finding a kind of symbiosis with the complexity around me.

Huang Hankang: It’s true that large Western institutions often do this: they bring attention to artists historically overlooked due to their identity and mount major exhibitions. Over the past decades, many excellent artists haven’t received enough exposure, so creating new opportunities to highlight them is entirely legitimate. But organizing exhibitions by ethnicity or region can never fully represent the artistic reality of that group. Such choices are inevitably partial.

Zhao Yu: I feel these exhibitions are mostly aimed at the general public, designed to attract attention and spark discussion. In China, there are also exhibitions that adopt a “grouping by category” approach, using labels like “post-80s” or “post-90s.” But this method is quite fragmented; it tends to simplify art itself. Whether such exhibitions can truly define the art of a generation or a group is highly questionable.

Zhang Yunyao: While contemporary Western art institutions are now most focused on identity, minority groups, and gender, in my observation, Chinese artists are often largely overlooked. We rarely see Chinese contemporary artists holding solo shows in major European institutions, and we are seldom invited to group exhibitions. So, for example, a group exhibition of Chinese artists at the Centre Pompidou this year can provide overseas audiences with a new understanding of Chinese contemporary art, which is positive. However, as an artist, when international curators collaborate with me, they generally focus more on my work itself rather than my identity.