Qiu Zhijie

signed in Chinese and dated 2009.2 and marked with two artist seals

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

China, Beijing, Ullen Center for Contemporary Art, Qiu Zhijie: Breaking through the Ice, 2009, p. 101  

This work is generally in good condition. Please note that it was not examined under ultraviolet light.
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In the contemporary Chinese art world, Qiu Zhijie is a uniquely multifaceted figure. From a young age, he was immersed in traditional Chinese culture and a practitioner of calligraphy. He entered the printmaking department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1990. In both his themes and use of artistic media, Qiu Zhijie’s practice is the richest and most wide-ranging among artists of his generation. Returning to his alma mater as a teacher in 2003, he advocated “Total Art” (zongti yishu), the inclusion of Zhuangzi’s thought, and intervention into society. From 2007 onwards, he developed the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge Project, the most important work in his recent years. Letters to Qiu Jiawa is part of this project and one of Qiu’s most personal and emotionally expressive series, and An Envelope to Qiu Jiawa: Just the Feeling Alive is enough to Please You  is one of the most important and unusual pieces within the series, which includes 31 large-scale ink paintings. Mere Feeling of Being Alive uses a tree trunk as a metaphor for life and to express fully a father’s love of his daughter. As the prologue to the series and the “envelope” of the 30 letters in it, it is extremely important and representative.

Qiu Zhijie is among the youngest “Post-89” artists. In the 1990’s, he was most concerned with the themes of the body and power. With a multifaceted creative practice encompassing conceptual photography, ink art, new media, and installations, he proactively opened new directions for art. The “Post-Sense Sensibility” exhibition that he instigated, moreover, has influenced an entire generation of young artists. In 2003, Qiu Zhijie began to argue for the concept of “Total Art,” which would incorporate social intervention and cultural research into artistic practice. The Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge Project was a concrete manifestation of this concept. In 2007, Qiu Zhijie began to collaborate with students in the China Academy of Art (as the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts is now known) and civic organizations to prevent suicides at the Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing, which had been a national suicide hotspot. In this experience, Qiu Zhijie realized that suicides are actually the so-called “failures” in a modern society obsessed with “success.” In front of the dejected would-be suicides, he used calligraphy and ink art to create protective talismans and to showcase a stronger and freer will.

Qiu Zhijie created Letters to Qiu Jiawa, a deeply personal series, for his daughter, and also for the his solo exhibition “Breaking Through the Ice,” at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. When he received the commission from the UCCA in 2009, Qiu Jiawa had just been born and was very ill. Qiu Zhijie was moved to express, in ink, his experiences of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge Project in the form of letters to his daughter. This ambitious endeavour resulted in 30 Letters to Qiu Jiawa. The Letters together formed the Yangtze River Bridge itself, with each three representing a bridge pier. Each scroll contained a message from Qiu Zhijie to his daughter. At the UCCA exhibition, An Envelope to Qiu Jiawa: Just the Feeling Alive is enough to Please You was given a special position as the “envelope” for all the other letters. The tree grows in the middle of a book, originating from a shell that emits a searchlight. These vivid symbols evoke the foundation of life and the central idea behind the 30 letters. Qiu Jiawa recovered, but the Letters have remained as the most powerful and moving summary of a stage of the Nanjing Yangtze River Project.

For Qiu Zhijie, “Total Art” is necessarily multidimensional and cannot be fully unfolded in one or two exhibitions. His calligraphic works for the suicide-prevention organizations and his proposals for therapeutic ink art are both instantiations of “Total Art.” He regards the Yangtze River Bridge as a site for self-cultivation: “The more I linger on the bridge, the more unusual and profound my imagery and use of brush and ink are. I am not just reiterating traditional formulae with increasing dexterity. Rather, the more I persist in writing and painting, the more sensitive and freer my soul becomes. To embark on a path of no return on xuan paper with a brush—this way of writing and painting strengthens my spirit and has allowed me to walk on the bridge. This is precisely a kind of intervention.” ¹ The Nanjing Yangtze Bridge Project continues in the present, inspiring a new generation of Chinese artists.

1 The artist’s comments in the symposium for Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, 2013.