The work of François Cheng – a writer, poet, calligrapher, essayist, academician of Chinese origin and
laureate of the French Francophone Academy is undoubtedly part of the cross-cultural literature of the end of the 20th and the
beginning of the 21st century, when writers and poets from different, in this case Eastern background, like Yoko Tawada, Anna
Moi, Amy Tan, Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami and others, have adopted the cross-cultural perspective of the migrant, the
person who finds oneself in a context in which one begins to make sense of the living world by reading the foreign signs,
comparing cultures and traditions, and translating the foreign culture in a particular way.
The term “cross-cultural” literature will be used here in its sense that the writer and researcher G. Chkhartishvili
associates with the new cultural phenomenon he calls “androgynous”, “East-Western literature” (Chkhartishvili, 1996).
What, I would argue, is common to these artists is the rejection of the dual East - West model of culture, or, in Sánchez’
words, “the challenging of the bipolar models” (Sánchez, 2014, p. 55), the rejection of barriers and boundaries, because the
cultures placed on both sides of such barriers are perceived either in terms of their own essential characteristics, or in ways that
go beyond the proposed divisions.
A portrait of the Composer in the Cross-Cultural Space of the 21st Century