It isn't easy to think about art that is made for the Orient, accustomed as we are to simply drawing stimuli from those regions, as we are busy trying to impose our own models on the world. This means that the new paintings by Nathalie Du Pasquier, created and even commissioned - as was once the case in the great tradition of painting - for China, force the critic to somehow adapt to a different way of seeing, to different desires and expectations. Different, but also full of a desire for approach, just as a westerner might look, from the opposite shores, at a Kangshi porcelain made for the European market.

 Nathalie Du Pasquier has, essentially, painted flowers, accompanied by a composition of objects that are less "hard" than her usual subjects, more "noble" in the choice of the objects themselves, which no longer allude to a material, practical world - as happens in her works for a European audience - but to a more symbolic, allegorical, spiritual reality. This happens because in the Orient, in a society that is simultaneously refined and traditional, what is "asked" of a painting is quite different from what is required elsewhere: while in the Occident we seek, above all other things, a sense of force, surprise, novelty, in the Orient what seems to be most important is harmony.
In this sense the cycle of works Du Pasquier has prepared for the connoisseurs of Hong Kong still pursues that harmonious construction which forms the basis for all of her paintings, but which in other cycles often receives less emphasis, almost overwhelmed by the raw quality and eccentricity of certain assemblages of objects. Moreover, this harmony, which is also based on the symbolic significance of the objects represented, is reinforced by the "way" it is depicted, by the style and the quality of the painting, which immediately indicate its cultural origins.

 Unlike oriental painting, which attempts to reproduce the sensation or atmosphere of objects or landscapes using the smallest possible number of signs, the western "still life" doesn't elude the act of being "painted", of revealing its own fictional character, the "art" involved, the opposite of nature. This too is a characteristic of the works of Du Pasquier; they are "painted" and they don't attempt to conceal the fact, they display their substance as paintings constructed through a discipline which is no longer - and perhaps has never been - a matter of imitation of nature. What is presented here is artifice, and "artifice" has the same etymological root as "art".