Over the past year I’ve been working on a project called “Forbidden Empire,” which is in two distinct parts: the first was a more traditional exhibition in which classical art from the southern Low Countries was juxtaposed with old masters from China and hung chronologically, from the 15th century to the 20th. It was shown here at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, then traveled to the Palace Museum in the Forbidden City in Beijing. I believe this was the first time that Chinese old masters and Western old masters—of course only from a specific region but still with enormous potential—were shown in relation to each other. That was a particularly fascinating starting point for me, because it created a chance to reactivate traditional art.

The second part, planned for 2008 and 2009, will be an exhibition that starts from a similar concept but with contemporary art. As with the first show, one of the interesting aspects of the project is that it’s between an enormous country and a tiny one. I will choose 35 Belgian artists, and Ai Weiwei, and perhaps another contemporary Chinese artist, will select 35 artists from China. All the Belgian artists will travel to China, and all the Chinese artists will come here and we’ll select the works and create the exhibition out of that dialogue. We’ll also be collaborating with a range of critics, artists, and curators.

I know you’ve just come back from one of several recent trips to China, presumably in preparation for the show. Were you there mainly to do studio visits?

No. Although I made some studio visits when I was in China, and I got to know a number of artists making strong work over there—Zhang Enli and Yang Zhenzhong in particular—I wasn’t there to prospect. I think it’s idiotic to try and prospect by yourself there as a Westerner. They have to organize themselves for the show over there, as we will here.

In what sense do curatorial projects like this one provide you a different way of approaching painting?

First because they allow me to work with objects I didn’t produce myself, and second, in this particular case, because of the opportunity to work with old masters, which are stunning in their qualitative power and became so as we were able to accrue meaning across a time span of centuries. When you recontextualize that differently, it allows you to look at them in a totally new way. The contemporary stage of the project will of course add to that by developing discourse between living artists, but working from a similar dynamic as the first show in that we’ll be foregrounding a similar type of questioning that comes from a very visually oriented premise. And that is of great importance for me personally, because I feel that contemporary art is, and always will be, primarily a process of visualization.

Luc Tuymans’s work appears in “The Painting of Modern Life,” at the Hayward Gallery, London, from October 4 to December 30. He will be the subject of a major survey at Haus der Kunst, Munich, opening February 29, 2008, and a retrospective at the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Columbus, Ohio, opening September 20, 2008.
"Unnatural Resources" comes to ARTINFO from the October 2007 issue of Modern Painters magazine.