The light of the East

Zhangjiagang, Jiangsu. November 18, 2025. A vast blaze has almost entirely destroyed the Wenchang Pavilion within the Yongqing Temple complex. The flames rapidly consumed the wooden structure. The fire damaged a site of significant historical and cultural value, even though the pavilion was only a modern reconstruction of the original building. Firefighters worked to contain the fire and prevent it from spreading to other sections of the monastic compound, founded in 536 CE. No casualties have been reported, though the material damage is extensive. The Temple blaze marks not only the collapse of a building but the disappearance of an aesthetic logic that, for millennia, has stood apart from our own: the logic of Eastern art, understood not merely as representation but as an enigmatic form of contemplation.

There, painting and calligraphy merge into a single discipline of gesture, where ink exalts the “void” as more meaningful than the “full,” and where the vital energy—qi—animates every line. It is an art that does not resist time but absorbs it; that venerates bamboo for its suppleness and rock for its eternity—worlds away from our obsession with form and three-dimensionality. This essence, elusive to the Cartesian rigor of the West, inevitably generated both fascination and deep misunderstanding, shaping what we call Orientalism in Western painting. Unable to grasp the philosophy behind lacquer and silk, Europe did the only thing it could: it appropriated this elsewhere—if not physically, then visually. That refined composure, that distant formal severity, sparked a kind of voracious curiosity.

It was a complex attraction, often a genuine seduction, exercised by the perceived mystery of Asia—not only the Middle Eastern world of markets and harems that captivated Gérôme and Delacroix, but, in a broader sense, everything that lay “East.” In the nineteenth century, European painters—saturated with Neoclassicism and academic codes—looked elsewhere for light, color, passion, and the wildness they believed had vanished from their industrial, bourgeois Europe.

The Orientalist was not merely an artist but a traveler of the imagination, projecting onto exotic garments, precious carpets, and shrouded figures his fantasies of opulence and backwardness. He created a palette of images of great impact but, let us not forget, often steeped in colonial stereotypes and shallow understanding. The Eastern object—whether a Japanese print or the idea of a distant temple—became a key that opened the way to bolder, more saturated forms of painting, capable of breaking established rules. Its allure—the allure of the Other, magnified and often misread—distorted reality while simultaneously pushing art toward entirely new formal languages. This tension is, in the end, the lifeblood of every artistic era. The Orientalist was a collector of borrowed images, a director of an exotic stage set. Few embodied this with the cool mastery of Jean-Léon Gérôme. Take The Snake Charmer: the hyper-realistic setting, obsessively detailed in its Anatolian-Ottoman tiles, frames a scene that feels staged and curiously airless.

At the center, slightly to the right, a half-naked boy handles a snake before an indifferent crowd of dignitaries and beggars. The work is a study in distance: Gérôme freezes the moment, renders it mute, allowing the Western eye to consume the exoticism of skin, poverty, ritual—without ever becoming involved. Its nudity is intellectual, a cold, clinical fascination sustained by mystery. If Gérôme was the academic reporter of Orientalism, Eugène Delacroix was its romantic, impassioned interpreter. In Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement), painting ignites with an inner fire, with an intimacy that is erotic but not voyeuristic.

Granted rare access to an actual harem, Delacroix returned with a catalogue of poses rendered in a chromatic symphony where the air seems dense with scent and quiet. The explosion of yellows, deep reds, and saturated blues fractures academic composition, transforming observation into a sensorial experience. Here, the East is no longer a theatrical backdrop but a vibrating soul, an emotional locus where light shapes the mystery of fabrics and glances. Nor can we forget Vincent van Gogh who, in his Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, inserts the farthest East by depicting behind him a print by Sato Torakiyo featuring Japanese women and the silhouette of Mount Fuji.

The exotic object actively reshapes the composition, revealing the depth of Van Gogh’s fascination. This attraction went beyond decorative taste, reaching the very roots of a philosophy of form. Japanese painting, with its flat planes, crisp contours, and disregard for atmospheric chiaroscuro, offered him a model to overcome the crisis of European naturalistic representation. The formal references that appear throughout his work—echoes of Japanese stylization and synthesis—are not mere homages. They serve as visual tools for a new emotional and chromatic reality, at least for the Western eye.

This is a dialogue spanning two centuries. On one side, an art seeking its center in silence and nature; on the other, an art that, through the East, tried to reclaim its color and passion. It is an eternal tension between the desire to understand and the irresistible temptation to possess the image.

Overview image: Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, 1880, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, via Wikimedia Commons