Qiu Zhijie

each with 2-4 seals of the artist; signed and titled in Chinese on a label affixed to the reverse

Executed in 2004.

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, China Onward, Denmark, 2007, pp. 240-241, illustrated in color

The first scroll has been pierced when rolled causing four holes to the painting, 8 holes to the mount and another approx 2cm into the pin. Would benefit from remounting and restoration. The third with a crease running horizontally across the centre of the paper. Otherwise generally in good condition.
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Qiu Zhijie is one of the most prolific and influential individuals in the Chinese art world today. His curatorial projects and critical writings have tended to expose the limits of convention, often through transgression (for example, the exhibitions Post-Sense Sensibility and Alien Bodies and Delusions), to reveal new directions for artistic expression. As an artist Qiu's innovations in a wide variety of media, including photography, installation, video, interactive CD-ROM, calligraphy, and ink rubbings, serve as an example to his students: he teaches in China's first new media arts program and is Co-Director of the Centre of Visual Culture, both at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou.

For his graduation piece—he graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) in 1992—Qiu Zhijie produced a major installation, Homage to Vita Nuova, consisting of large glass panels suspended from the ceiling, painted and printed with images that overlapped in changing combinations as viewers walked between them through the installation. The transparency of the base medium and the shifting perspectives destroyed any sense of the finiteness of the separate images. When the exhibition closed, Qiu washed the images off the glass. This early piece employed a key device that was to run through his future oeuvre: the obscuring or erasing of an image, often through superimposition. This is central to his acclaimed Tattoo II (Lot 174), a photograph of the artist with the character bu (no/not) inscribed in red across his body. The character is legible only if the artist stands perfectly in place so that the paint on his body aligns with the continuation of the character painted on the wall behind him.

Throughout his career, Qiu Zhijie has returned repeatedly to themes of time and text, particularly calligraphy. Ten Odes to the Moon (Lot 155) combines calligraphy with the concept of effacement and Forever Night – Green (Lot 175) compares the nature of calligraphy as a linear process with photography as a temporal event. Prior to creating Ten Odes to the Moon (and other similar works), Qiu Zhijie taught himself to write calligraphy backwards. He then videotaped himself writing out each poem in reverse: videos and calligraphy are exhibited together. Played backwards, the videos show the writing disappearing as the brush shapes the characters and moves down the paper, so that the artist is UN-writing the poems. The unexpectedness of this can at first be difficult for the viewer to process mentally: rather than recording the act of creating a work of calligraphy, which is itself the record of a great historical poem, each video portrays the erasure of calligraphy and poem. Will the ascendance of the new—namely a new culture centered around technology—result in the disappearance of the old?

Forever Night – Green (Lot 175) belongs to a body of work Qiu Zhjie created by writing with light, termed by the artist calli-photo-graphy. While writing is clearly a linear temporal process, photography is generally thought of as the freezing of an instant. Combining photography with calligraphy that disappears moment by moment as it is written, the artist reveals the fact that photographs result from a process occurring over a window of time. More importantly, Qiu is raising issues concerning the interplay between technology and the cultural landscape: to adorn natural settings, garden corners, and buildings with calligraphic inscriptions is an established activity within traditional Chinese culture; for those inscriptions to be extremely short-lived is not. With calli-photo-graphy the calligraphic work of art is captured at the site, existing thereafter only within the photographic work of art.

-Britta Erickson