Qiu Deshu

signed in and dated 1997 in Chinese, framed

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, China Onward, Denmark, 2007, pp. 232-233, illustrated in color

Framed, generally in good condition. Not examined out of frame.
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Qiu Deshu's Self-Portrait (Spirit) (Lot 146) expresses the unity between the artist's signature creative method and his understanding of the universe and his place within it, both of which are described by the term he has coined, liebian (split-change). Qiu has been developing the concept of liebian—translated into English as "fissuring" to indicate both tearing and change—since the early 1980s. It aptly characterizes his creative process, which begins with painting with vivid colors on xuan paper, tearing it, and then adhering select pieces to a base layer using the techniques traditionally employed in mounting Chinese paintings. When spaces show between the mounted torn papers they read as fissures or, if less dramatic, then as fine meanders through a varied landscape. Abrading or burnishing the paper, or mounting white paper atop colors, produce additional effects: the final work is a sophisticated combination of painting and collage.

The "split" and "change" of liebian reflect the disjointed path of Qiu Deshu's life and career. As a child he studied the arts of ink painting and seal carving, but instead of attending art school he found himself laboring in the Number Eighteen Shanghai Plastics Factory throughout most of the Cultural Revolution. Rededicating himself to art at the close of that tumultuous era, he co-founded the short-lived Grass Painting Society (Cao Cao Hua She). As his interest in abstraction was deemed "bourgeois" he was ordered to cease painting during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of 1983. Following the dramatic disruptions fragmenting his life, he has grown; he has come to believe that rupture and creation are intimately joined in an essential dynamic process that generates everything from living cells to celestial bodies. As an expression of his place within this ongoing universal dynamic, Qiu created his unique Self-Portrait (Spirit), a landscape in which facial features emerge from the mountain formations to suggest the presence of the human spirit-the artist's spirit.

-Britta Erickson