| The first time I came across the work of artist Qiu Qijing was in the 798 district in March. While on one of my friends’ computers, I discovered a group of images of landscape settings under the exhibition title “Migration,” which gave me the urge to know this artist better. In terms of the size, quantity of material used and context for his works, these are some of the greatest in the country. The main material component of his works is Shoushan stone, which the artist has never failed to take care of and employ in his creations since he was born here and has grown up in the area. |  |
Migration: Ten thousand crags and torrents treated lightly – Chen Mo
The first time I came across the work of artist Qiu Qijing was in the 798 district in March. While on one of my friends’ computers, I discovered a group of images of landscape settings under the exhibition title “Migration,” which gave me the urge to know this artist better. In terms of the size, quantity of material used and context for his works, these are some of the greatest in the country. The main material component of his works is Shoushan stone, which the artist has never failed to take care of and employ in his creations since he was born here and has grown up in the area. The scientific explanation of this type of stone is that it is a rock that comes into being within an underground layer of metasomatic deposit lava, and with such features as a greasy feel，flakiness, cleavage, rigidity，crystallization and high density, all in sheet or actinomorphic aggregate form. The stone is mainly produced in Shoushan, on the outskirts of Fuzhou, and its main composition is a stone type called agalmatolite. However, its cultural explanation is much more inexplicit and vague. It is a sort of material with which the handicraftsman makes craftwork according to the subjective desirability or demand of customers, or according to the trends of the market. Such works as these often enter into local practicability or collections, either in the form of a seal or in the form of desk sculpture, and these traditional uses have continued for several hundred years, uninterrupted.
Together, along with the traditional local culture so full of rich connotations, these pieces have become a part of a thick accumulation of unity and coherence within the national culture. The benign and favorable significance of such an accumulation of culture lies in connecting and integrating the excellent cultural resources from various eras and in turning these into a sort of visualized model of successions. Nevertheless, this significance seems rather egregiously stagnant and cumbersome. Under the disguise of “heritage,” many people are hunting the heritage of their predecessors, and this hunt is characterized by reproducing these “traditions” openly and publicly—in a state of peaceful exposition. The cost of so doing is that the responsibility, conscience and creativity of the later generation is held back and left out of the domain of true development. In the meantime, local issues in the economy have resulted in a polarization of the rich and the poor, and this is, to a great extent, testing the humanity and its morality, therefore intensifying the collision of various contradictions. Apparently, under this grand social and cultural background, Qiu Qijing is well prepared to put forward his work Migration, with this unique view on social criticism.
The work covers a series of processes of conception, material selection, creation, transport, erection, landscaping and etc., and the artist has gone beyond the construction of artworks in contexts with which we might be familiar. The work is instead verging on becoming a “floating” artwork. In the words of the artist himself: “How many feet with thick callosity have been frayed in the steps of history to arrive at today’s civilization? Desire is the most terrible enemy of the human being and the most bullheaded potential of human civilization. The city is like a large piece of cake swelling endlessly, inciting and provoking savagery and greed and, meanwhile, it is like a huge magnet, magnetizing all the evils of human beings. By borrowing this symbolic sign of traditional culture, varying, re-forging and injecting it with a conceptual anaphora to create in it a common understanding among all is the embodiment of wisdom. The criticism of culture will then ascend to the criticism of society, and a scholar-bureaucrat class, symbolized by Shousan stone itself, as well as an influential official interest group on behalf of the scholar-bureaucrat class, will come into being. At the same time, weak colonies surviving on the fringes of mainstream society—the mighty and the weak have been defined, internally, since long ago with the result being self-evident and speaking for itself. In such an era where information, policy, rights and interests are asymmetrical, everything is also, on the one hand, under the monopoly of profit and boundless avarice while many groups of people have not been able to afford enough food and clothing. Both groups, however, are striving for the interest of each in this endless migration.
The difference is that the former group is a kind of oracle by right of rights and power, while the latter is risking the lives of its members to struggle for the basics in living conditions. There is no balance of forces; the strength and the advantages do not match. Group after group of people come to dust in the combat between them and regress to their origins. What is lamentable is that such a game of transmigration between the rich and the poor, between the mighty and the weak, and between life and death has both originated in human beings and perished in human beings. Yet, never have these facts been able to caution human beings, fundamentally. Facing such embarrassment, what can we do? Probably go from migration to migration in an endless migration.
