Qiu Zhijie

Chicago, David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art; Eugene, University of Oregon Museum of Art; Hanover, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century, 1999, no. 22.2, p. 171 and back cover, illustrated in color
New York, International Center of Photography and Asia Society; Chicago, Smart Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art; Seattle Art Museum; London, Victoria & Albert Museum, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, 2004 - 2006, no. 116, p. 158, illustrated in color

Qiu Zhijie was an eager young undergraduate during the upheavals of 1989. He was also, through and through, an obedient student, able at once to satisfy the exacting demands of his teachers at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) where he is now a professor, and to produce adventurous works far outside the strictures of Chinese academic training. His graduation work in 1993, an installation of hanging glass panels depicting cartoonish scenes from his personal and intellectual life, was included in the watershed exhibition China’s New Art, Post-1989 and won him international attention for its sophisticated dialogue with the then-popular forms of Western installation and conceptual art which were still making inroads into China. The present works grow out of that initial moment in the artist’s career.

Writing the Orchid Pavilion Preface 1000 Times (Lot 74) is a project at once performative and material. In it, the artist simply copied the most commonly assigned of all practice passages for aspiring calligraphers - the Orchid Pavilion Preface - in his own finely honed brushwork, over a five year period between 1990 and 1995. The original literary and calligraphic masterpiece by Wang Xizhi dates to 334 A.D. and contains 28 rows of 324 characters in the xingshu (walking) style. In this work, the newly graduated Qiu continued to re-copy the passage until the paper had blackened and crumpled under the weight of the ink. 

Offered here as a set of five chromogenic prints from an edition of 10 in this middle size and a DVD from an edition of 25 (corresponding to the total edition of the photographs in all three sizes), Writing the Orchid Pavilion Preface 1000 Times occupies a central place in the history of contemporary art in China after 1989. Critical interpretations have been many and varied: some readings have argued that the piece voices desperation about a tradition that has been copied and derived to the point of obfuscation. Others have suggested that the work argues for locating the roots of Chinese avant-garde art deep in the literati tradition, the natural and necessary outgrowth of the traditional canon. The artist has remarked that eventually “the characters are turned into a visual merging of ink, like an abstract painting…the text is rewritten on the paper, which gradually turns black with no trace of the brush mark or nuances of ink. Calligraphy is made Zen.” (Exh. Cat., The First Guangzhou Triennial, p. 150)

Writing and erasure have remained among the major themes of Qiu’s oeuvre; in Calligraphy Erased (Lot 73), the artist pairs six sheets of his own calligraphic renderings of Tang poems written in reverse with a video, also played in reverse, in which the characters seem to disappear as his brush touches over them. Qiu has also influenced others: Zhang Huan’s 2000 photographic series Family Tree (Lot 76), in which the artist paints his face with the story of "Yugong Moving the Mountain" until it is totally covered in ink, is directly and admittedly derivative of Qiu’s Orchid Pavilion Preface work.

Tattoo 1 (Lot 72) comes from a pair of highly influential photographic studies undertaken by the artist in 1994 investigating the relationship between (Chinese) body and image. Its partner, Tattoo 2 depicts the artist at age 26, his bared chest emblazoned with a portion of the character bu (meaning “no”), the character fading across the artist’s body and onto the white background, making the two intertwined entities appear at once inseparable and distinct. In the present work, numbered 1 from an exceedingly rare edition of 10, silver pins replace red paint, as the artist’s body is placed at the center of an “an ever-expanding visual field, with neither set boundaries nor clear signification.” (Wu Hung in Exh. Cat., New York, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, 2004, p. 30) In this way, the photograph, which pairs the raw documentary quality of a passport or identification photo with the conceptual flourish of the silver dots, speaks to the dislocation of the individual at a moment of historical transition. These photographs were followed, in the years between 1997 and 2002, by a number of other Tattoo photographs, depicting the bare-chested artist painted with a bar-code and a one-way sign, among others. None of these later additions have made as deep an impression as Tattoo 1 and Tattoo 2, works which were widely reproduced (particularly on the back cover and poster for the 1999 exhibition Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century) and subsequently became iconic of the entire state of Chinese contemporary art in the late 1990s.

Shortly after the completion of these works, Qiu shifted directions, working more in video and becoming a highly influential thinker and curator among the Beijing avant-garde. A landmark series of exhibitions he organized at the end of the 1990s under the rubric Post-Sense Sensibility galvanized a new generation of artists, and produced an entire corpus of work meditating on the same themes of body, individual, and society that were initially raised by Qiu’s Tattoo pairing.