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Publications

“Love is a Tea that Brews Slowly”

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Christine Cayol - Ed. Hervé Chopin, 2022

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"Yuan fen: a predestined encounter willed by heaven".

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""With your broken mouth you'll wreak havoc, and if you don't wreak havoc, you'll make a fortune, and if you make a fortune, you'll wreak havoc. "Chao's uncle used to say.
Ever since his tragic accident when he was just 6 years old, Chao has known he was different. Acupuncture, but also a picture book about France, helped him to look beyond his injuries to find out what he was going to become.
At the age of 21, Chao chose Paris to help build his family's empire in a China in turmoil. He knows that at the tip of the Vert Galant, facing the docile or impetuous water, someone is waiting for him.
Inès moves through life with pain and determination. She is French, married and the mother of two children. Everything keeps them apart.
But neither Chao nor Inès can resist the luminous energy born of their meeting in a Parisian café. It's called yuan fen, a predestined meeting willed by heaven."

“Crossing the River While Feeling the Stones”

 

Christine Cayol - Ed. Tallandier, 2019
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“The ten proverbs proposed in this book are drawn from the daily life of present-day China. I chose them simply because I hear them, because they are companions on the road and any attentive ear can have access to them. They orient the heart towards essential questions, those of death and the relationship to the ancestors. They encourage people to love their country, teach them not to separate joy from sadness, not to get impatient, to understand who they are dealing with. They recall the benefits of accuracy and warn of the dangers of always doing more. They invite us to move forward in life as we do in the river, without ceasing to appreciate the solidity of the points of support. They reconcile speed and patience, momentum and stopping. These are precious proverbs for today »

“Why Do the Chinese Have the Time?”

 

Christine Cayol - Ed. Tallandier, 2017
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" We are sick of time, and we always have been. He pushes us, gets ahead of us, bores us, and then one day, after humiliating us, he stops. We complain about its acceleration and enjoy it at the same time. We are afraid for the future of the planet, for that of our children. We throw ourselves into all sorts of personal development methods, we dream of being zen and knowing how to let go... and we barely manage to place in our digital agenda, between two appointments, a time of prayer or a meditation session. "
Christine Cayol has lived in China for fifteen years. Every day, she is a little more surprised by the way the Chinese apprehend time : a relationship to the organization, to life, to the future – diametrically opposed to ours – more efficient, freer, more spiritual.

Without renouncing progress, the Chinese draw from their traditional culture a discreet wisdom of time. Where we add, they empty, where we slow down, they speed up. Time in China is like waves breaking on the beach. You have to know how to play with them. This agility of Chinese time is a source of inspiration for all those who know that it is only by curing oneself of the disease of time that we will assume our responsibility for the world to come.

The book was also published in Dutch on August 27, 2018.

“What Do Chinese People Think When Looking at the Mona Lisa ?”

 

Christine Cayol and Wu Hongmiao - Ed. Tallandier, 2012
 
What do the Chinese see and what do they think of us, of our culture, when they visit our museums and admire our paintings ? What do they think of when looking at the face of Mona Lisa or that of the Virgin Mary ? Why so many suffering Christ ?
 
At the edge of the history of art and the essay, this book takes the form of a conversation between Christine Cayol, a philosopher residing in China, and Wu Hongmiao, dean of the French language faculty at the Wuhan University.
From around twenty masterpieces of Western painting, from Giotto to Picasso, via Rembrandt and Vélasquez, the two authors confront their ways of seeing, looking, thinking, perceiving, and understanding the world today. It is for them to compare their approaches in order to measure the extent of their differences and their similarities. Are we so far apart ?
 
At a time when China is becoming a leading partner, it is time to understand how the Chinese perceive our civilization, and vice versa...

 

"I'm Catholic and I'm in pain"

 

Christine Cayol - Edition Seuil 2006
 
" I am catholic. It could have been otherwise. Sometimes I imagine myself in a Buddhist, Muslim, Protestant, Jewish, Orthodox world, but I am Catholic and so far I have never regretted it. Only one thing bothers me about this name: “Catholic” would mean “universal”. Universal like everything one seeks to impose in the name of a more or less avowed superiority, in the name of fear too. Being Catholic for me is not universal, although I find joy in being in churches around the world. To be Catholic is not for me a behavior, nor a morality, even less a quality: it is quite simply a matter of joy. Since I became aware of being baptized, this joy has not left me. I'm Catholic and I'm in pain. This is why I write. This is the diary of my pain, of my revolt, of my hope too. »
 

“Sensitive Intelligence: Picasso, Shakespeare, Hitchcock, to the Rescue of the Economy”

 

Christine Cayol - Ed. Global Village 2003
 
Picasso, Shakespeare, Hitchcock, but to help what exactly ?
 
To help a technical vision of the world which has found its main expression in the economy. To help an economy which has lost its primary mission and which has discarded man as a being of culture and sensibility. Helping those who want to live and work in a more humane world.
 
In response to the impasses of human organizations which advocate financial profitability and technical ideology but no longer believe in its progress, Christine Cayol proposes a new path, through art, culture and life.
Sensitivity, like thought, is worked on and sharpened from the confrontation with other looks, other worlds, other ideas. Christine Cayol relies on the encounter with works of art to rehabilitate sensitive intelligence and awaken the sense of this intelligence in her reader.

“Seeing is an art: Ten paintings to inspire and innovate”

 

Christine Cayol - Ed. World Village 2004
 
What is the use of art in our lives? How does it help us change our outlook on ourselves and on the world? From Velázquez to Mondrian, from Caravaggio to Pollock, Christine Cayol offers ten paintings by great masters for our consideration. Each of them is an opportunity to open up to the singularity of the look that gave birth to it and illustrates a psychological, social, spiritual posture: to transgress, to subvert, to dare to see, to take risks, to stand aside... link with the spirit of innovation.
 
Because it is all about that: to be inspired, to renew oneself, and for that to see differently, to dare one's gaze in a technique, a know-how, to risk oneself in the implementation of this new vision and thereby to innovate. 
 
And if the artistic and human adventures that are proposed to us here are possible, it is because "something, certainly, is invented in painting, but which at the same time goes beyond its field and comes from a certain relationship to the world, to another, to life. 

 

“ Art in Spain 1936-1996 ”

 

Christine Cayol - New French Editions 1996
 
“It is a question of tracing the face of an imposing structure, both in richness and novelty, of an art which, over the course of a complex political situation, seeks to construct its own definition, including through the diversity of the individualities that it brings up. More than a structure, we should speak of a dynamic and zigzagging whole, and relativize the attempts at chronological sections (…)”
 
  • Facing History: 1936-1939
  • The Impossible Oblivion: 1939-1957
  • Rupture and advent: 1957-1965
  • Foreign models and New Figuration 1960-1975
  • Explosion of individualities: the multicolored decade 1975-1995
 
 
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