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Xian, China, where the Terracotta Warriors are.

They probably work a lot, but they are not known by their artistic skills, at least when we talk about the great arts. They don’t have great painters, nor beautiful sculptures; their paintings look childish and their busts expressionless. Maybe the 8000 Terracotta Warriors found buried in Xian are an exception. Each of them has a different face, but they are not an artistic display. The archeologists say that the meaning of such work of art was an exhibition of power to decorate the Emperor grave, with no other hidden or esoteric intention. We prefer to think that the monarch, proud of his army after winning a battle, promised each of them a statue, reward saved only for gods at that time.

Coming back to our Chinese artists, they didn’t put too much effort in architecture either. The Great Wall is impressive because of its dimensions, but not its beauty. The same happens now with the Three Gorges Dam, the biggest in the world. In Europe it would have cost ten times more, and Foster or Calatrava would have added one of their bridges, one of those that are exactly the same either they are over the Ria of Bilbao, or they represent a couple dancing tango in Buenos Aires. In literature, they don’t have any author that really stands out, even though 2500 years ago thinkers such as Confucius or Lao were as big as the Greek philosophers. And we don’t even want to talk about music, where one of those days any Yankee is going to kick up a fuss at the Chinese Opera when he sees that he paid a fortune to put up with Winnie the Pooh ruining notes to the rhythm of Teletubbies.

But all these observations are made form our western perspective because, although they don’t seem to stand out in “our” arts, in “theirs”, they are able to create beauty where there’s nothing. In the most simple things, in the smallest details. Isn’t it art the movements of the missing Bruce Lee? Or how would we call Tai-Chi, that well-known form of relaxation based on slow-fighting moves against no adversary? With them, the mind tries to perform the fight inside our bodies to keep the evil spirits away, or simple to get rid of the anger, that in China as in Europe, there is plenty. Every morning, millions of Chinese people gather in parks, alone or in groups, to perform these exercises. Not far from these mind soldiers, it’s easy to find scribes using the ground as virgin canvas, drawing Chinese words with big paintbrushes and very carefully. Each character of the Chinese alphabet is a story itself. It is a mixture of graphic representation of its meaning and its phonetic pronunciation. It is more a paint to look at and enjoy as it was a piece of art than something to read.

Another of these Chinese curiosities is the Garden of Stones. Unrefined spaces, almost rough, with paths outlined by common stones, but broken by tracks twisted with soft curves as if they were the palace of a little dwarf. Here and there you can always find a marble bench or an arbor to admire their crowning jewel. Among trees and cactus spread out greedily, long columns emerge where odd stones rest. Abstract but alive figures are the outcome of the water’s caprice which shaped them for years. Extracted form the bottom of the lakes as if they were a precious treasure, they are treated as such, decorating their gardens. They are sculptures made by nature, sometimes porous other times rectilinear, which only need a name to become poetry. Thus, the names of theses master pieces seem to have been found with the same parsimony as those stones were sculpted, as if only time could polish their faults and turn them into wonder

The result is odd labyrinths, grey but magnetic, able to transmit a special serenity. To a certain extent they remind me to the gardens that are abundant around El Maresme, seaside of Barcelona. Just like in Can Cuiros, the house of our grandfather Caralps. We always thought that grandpa’s half-closed eyes were his silent and intelligent way to see the world, marked by the accumulated tiredness of being in it for too many years. But maybe that look comes from some Chinese ancestor, gardener to be more specific. Who knows? What is certain is that one day we will have a Chinese descendant. And it will be sooner than what we think.

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