| Dinosaurs maraud in downtown Beijing. Scaly lizard bodies sprout Kewpie doll heads, and the sky rains silver with “renminbi”—the people’s money. Chen Qingqing’s stunning new series of light box installation photography bursts with creative collocations of imagery that illuminate her unique and provocative visions of who we are, and what we are well on our way to becoming. Although she only began making art a little over a decade ago, Qingqing has been making her own characteristic mark in China and abroad ever since. Before answering her calling as an artist, she worked in traditional Chinese medicine for almost a decade. | 
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Dinosaurs maraud in downtown Beijing. Scaly lizard bodies sprout Kewpie doll heads, and the sky rains silver with “renminbi”—the people’s money. Chen Qingqing’s stunning new series of light box installation photography bursts with creative collocations of imagery that illuminate her unique and provocative visions of who we are, and what we are well on our way to becoming.
Although she only began making art a little over a decade ago, Qingqing has been making her own characteristic mark in China and abroad ever since. Before answering her calling as an artist, she worked in traditional Chinese medicine for almost a decade. Her knowledge of pressure points, energy flows and such, surfaced in her early installation works, but quite soon she moved on to new zones of exploration.
Studies of German language and literature, which led Qingqing to live the expat life in Vienna for almost 15 years before returning to China in the mid-90s, have informed her work as well. "I don’t like to be too direct in my work," she explains, describing artwork reminiscent of childhood fairytales in the dark and unsentimental style of the Brother’s Grimm with Chinese characteristics. "I want people to explore the meanings for themselves and let the works speak to their own lives."
She first gained international fame for her diminutive dioramic installations. Initially, she appropriated classically "Chinese" symbols to comment on the ways in which tradition structures our lives. In Coffin, she does this with objects such as "lotus cups"—the tiny embroidered silk shoes worn by foot-bound women—hidden beneath a shroud of hemp fibers. Works such as Wish, Want, Desire—in which the translucent nipples from hundreds of baby bottles protrude from Chinese bamboo songbird cages—and Money! Money! Money!, her hemp and flower map of China, dotted with “renminbi” coins—foreshadow her coming preoccupation with human greed and its potential consequences.
The evolution of Qingqing’s expressive language took on new complexities as she explored the expressive possibilities of a wide array of her gorgeous hemp and flower dress installations, which feature the tactile delicacy of fine hemp fibers and the subtle strength of this durable material. This combination of fragility and strength is exemplified in her “Artificial Artifacts-Han” series. Qingqing hints at the paradoxical nature of female power, so often cloaked in feigned fragility, suggesting that the structures that shape the presentation of our selves, are humanly made and, hence, changeable. In one such recent work, entitled Like the Wind, she makes the dress three-dimensional and free-standing, as if inhabited by an unseen body, foregrounding how our exterior trappings define and manifest who we are in particular ways that sometimes also render what’s beneath the literally invisible.
Qingqing’s performances manifest a clear and continuous lineage to her other works, with prominent symbols and inquiries into the human condition reappearing in a number of her best known performance art works, such as the traditional Chinese medical massage she gave a live pig in 1999—commenting not so obliquely on the rise of the sex trade in China alongside the rise of the new karaoke-carousing and banquet-fattened bourgeoisie.
In larger diorama installations, such as The Big Happy Camp, a variety of now familiar constellations dot the map of her symbolic universe—dinosaurs, those powerful goliath reptiles that refuse to go extinct, haunt the landscape of her work; a forest of clear fiberglass phalluses threaten dark-skinned baby dolls; dismembered arms of plastic dollies reach, grasping from a computer keyboard; hybrid creatures try to worm their way into the labyrinth of pipes threading their way through the cabinet; and a pig steers his tank in search of action.
Her latest work takes these explorations into new dimensions with luminous results—a series of light box photography installations that weave a multi-layered tapestry of meaning and nuance. Visually rich, these new works seem both to float, ethereally, above the human world and, simultaneously, to bring us back down to hard realities on earth. Qingqing’s narratives are like surreal adult fairytales—fables and allegories that seem whimsical on the surface, but in fact contain sobering insights about the human condition and the state we’ve gotten ourselves into in this world of rapid technological change, political intrigue, ecological waste and economic gluttony. Armies of pigs scrambling their way to the top, fiberglass dildos that hint at masculine power, worthless tin coins, fortune-making paper bills, computer keyboards, clone dollies stripped naked, and legions of marauding dinosaurs who refuse to let themselves become extinct parade through her works as warnings about what we might, or perhaps have already, become.
The surface innocence and playfulness of her work provides the softness that contains that hard, cold steeliness of her ongoing commentary on where we’ve come from and where we’re likely to go if we keep at it. Far from sugarcoating reality with her lush color and vivid imagery, Chen Qingqing presents the world in which we live with a sweet irony that betrays just how much there is at stake.
