Christine Cayol inspires people to take time and not act as though we are living on borrowed time. Provided to China Daily

Christine Cayol has created a space to rest, reflect, discover and be inspired amid the gritty bustle of downtown Beijing

In the inner reaches of Beijing's Second Ring Road is a refuge for weary travelers lost between the looming office buildings and the ever-threatened hutongs that rim the Forbidden City. Walking through the gates and into the large, often deserted courtyard, visitors find a space that is strangely inviting. It's hard to tell what exactly you've found, but somehow it is obvious that you're welcome.

For the founder Christine Cayol, the ambiguity of Yishu 8 is important. "You enter and feel something different," she says.

The building, the original Sino-French University established in 1920, holds two art galleries. Framing the galleries is a series of finely decorated rooms abundant with fresh flowers, upholstered armchairs and the incidental chaise longue. This is not the kind of gallery that encourages a fast-paced circuit tour. In Yishu 8 Cayol hopes any visitor will "stop, discover, rest, reflect and be inspired."

Cayol herself inspires you to want to take time. Petite yet delightfully animated, she is alive with hard-won wisdom. A philosopher on the art of living and gifted with an appreciation for the finer things in life, she believes the right attitude comes from finding the time to engage. "You need to make time to enter the inner world, feel a quiet, feel the difference," she says.

For Cayol, art should be at the center of every home. She moved to Beijing from Paris in 2004 and Yishu 8 was started four years later. Her eyes twinkling but her tone serious she tells me that if there is only one Chinese word I should know, it should be "yuanfen - right place, right time, right person."

Cayol believes places like Yishu 8 are alarmingly scarce in our modern fast-paced world. "We're in a society where we act as though we're living on borrowed time," she says. "Through email, through twitter, we're all living in the instant but we're forgetting how to contemplate or reflect. People don't seem to realize that time is not just now - time is past, present and future. And being in touch with this continuity is the key."

There could hardly be a more appropriate setting for Yishu 8 than the Sino-French University. And it is clear that Cayol feels blessed to have found a building so accurately aligned with her own beliefs. "Don't you feel it?" she asks in a hushed tone. "This place is not empty; the building holds the souls, the spirits of what happened 100 years ago. I feel the connection to these. I feel a link to what they were aiming to do.

"I'm creating a contemporary art space in a very old, traditional heritage building. I like this idea. I like that we are not creating something totally new. We are continuing along a path that started a 100 years ago."

In terms of contemporary culture Beijing was in need of a Yishu 8, according to Cayol. "There were very avant-garde places that were imitating Western avant-garde centers but lacking of a place linked with a deep understanding of culture," she says.

The art in Yishu 8 couldn't be further from that exhibited in the glitzy commercial spaces of Beijing's 798 Art District. Yishu 8 is subtle and refined. Certainly the two current exhibitions - Chinese artist Li Xin's au fil de l'eau on the ground floor and the Hungarian Victor Popov's From Song Di to Venice on the upper - require an artistically sensitive audience. You can't just walk in and walk out; questions need to be asked.

As if to prove the point, while Cayol and I were talking we were interrupted by two American expats asking about Popov's artistic process. They were fascinated with Yishu 8: "I can't believe I didn't know about this," said one.

In essence Yishu 8 is, as Cayol puts it, the "laboratory" of her original brainchild the consulting firm Synthesis. Synthesis was founded a good 10 years before she moved to Beijing and works to assist business managers by awakening within them an "emotional intelligence". As the Synthesis website states, emotional intelligence will lead to self-understanding, social intelligence and also narrative intelligence (a capacity to read a situation).

Everything that is taught in the seminars or coaching courses of Synthesis is founded in Cayol's belief that an appreciation for art and culture can be used as a tool for management. For example, a deep understanding of the financial markets in China requires a deep understanding of Chinese culture. But it's more than just this. It's the difference, she says, between being "awed or bored" while standing in front of an abstract work. "A demanding piece of art requires a fully-engaged public," she says.

For Cayol, opening yourself up is the key to successful management. As she puts it, "Every company is always talking about our responsibility to sustainable development. But if you want to be linked with the idea of sustainability, you have to yourself be linked with the idea of duration, of taking time. You have to live what you preach; otherwise it just remains an abstract concept."

Before she followed her husband to Beijing in 2004, Cayol had never thought she was going to live in China. Her first impressions however, were only positive.

"It was spring and driving in from the airport I saw many gardens. I saw people strolling, calm and easy-going. My first impression was that Beijing was warm and the people like to talk, like to joke," she says.

She smiles wryly. "Beijingers like to have fun. They have a certain sense of theatrical comedy."

Cayol began her career teaching French at the Universit Complutense in Madrid and with her Spanish-French roots it is perhaps unsurprising that her favorite artist is Picasso. But her appreciation for Picasso's art lies deeper than a similarity in their cultural backgrounds. For her, Picasso symbolizes the duality of innovation and tradition.

"In all his works you can feel the past, present and future. He is dialoguing with history, his own present, while also opening new paths for the future," she says.

This idea of dialogue is important to Cayol and the difference between dialogue and argumentation is the topic of her latest book A quoi pensent les Chionois en regardant Mona Lisa (What do the Chinese think when they look at the Mona Lisa?) co-written with Professor Wu Hongmiao, head of French at Wuhan University.

She compares dialogue to the physical act of two people climbing a mountain. You can't come to a dialogue believing you already know the truth. Rather, the key to a strong intercultural dialogue is to be open to each others view - working together to reach the point of the precipice, the essential point of what you are discussing.

An appointment with Cayol leaves you in a strange twilight zone. On the one hand you feel exhausted from so furiously dialoguing, yet on the other you feel more awake. I lingered in the courtyard before I left Yishu 8, savoring those last moments of quiet contemplation before stepping back outside into the slow feverish surge of dusty Beijing life. It struck me as ironic that the thought of Beijing's gritty interior brought to mind something Picasso once said: 'Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life'.

Really, this is exactly what Cayol is all about.

For China Daily

(China Daily European Weekly 06/21/2013 page29)