These are two of the questions that artist Qiu Anxiong is asking the public.
We are inviting everyone to participate in this survey. You may leave us a comment or private message with your answers and doubts or click on “Read more” to fill out our survey. This Saturday, November 28th, artist Qiu Anxiong and Artsy China's Director of Content and Marketing, Ms. Sonia Xie, will be joining us at APSMUSEUM to discuss and answer your questions about "contemporary art."
On this occasion, we present a special screening of artist Qiu Anxiong’s animation film, New Classics of Mountains and Seas I.
The ink-wash animated film series of New Classics of Mountains and Seas are QiuAnxiong’s most important representative work. With references from the Classics of Mountains and Seas, a Chinese classic of ancient myths, the film series demonstrate the modern civilization in a primitive setting. By viewing the global political landscape from an immemorial perspective, they turn the phenomena that we ignore into materials of myths with a sense of distance, and present the audience with fantastic scenes seemingly from another world. The film series also develop the expressiveness of ink-wash painting in the contemporary language system, integrate the expressionistichand-drawn animation into film-making processes, and voice the criticism on the real world with vivid and peculiar images. With the conflict over energy resources as the main clue, the New Classics of Mountains and Seas I showcases how modern industrial civilization has alienated mankind and the resulting conflicts over geopolitical interests. The New Classics of Mountains and Seas II, based on biotechnology and space technology, pictures the human crises brought by the development of scientific technologies from both macro and micro perspectives. As for the New Classics of Mountains and Seas III, it shows the confusion resulting from the internet in the future information society by projecting the reality onto the future: In a wasteland-like city surrounded by virtual hologram images, everyone is playing a dual role — a virtual one and a real one; with the virtual lives confused with the real ones, people get stuck obsessing over the virtual joys and fantasies created by themselves, and become tedious working machines in their real lives; eventually, the virtual world collapses under the pressure of conflicts in the real world. By describing the intertwined and contradictory relationship between the virtual and real worlds, the film proposes a paradox of human existence in the information society.
Qiu Anxiong was born in 1972 in Sichuan province. He graduated from Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1994. In 2003 he graduated from the University Kassel's College of Art in Germany after six years of studying both contemporary international art and traditional Chinese culture. Now he is teaching in East China Normal University. His works employs different kinds of mediums including animation, painting, installation and video, etc. Representative works are animation film New Classic of Mountains and Seas, Temptation of the Land, Minguo Landscape, video installation Staring into Amnesia. He founded “Museum of Unkown” in 2007, which is an active power in the ecological construction of contemporary arts in recent years.
Qiu Anxiong’s recent work consists largely of paintings, animations, and video installations. In the 2006 piece The New Classic of Mountains and Seas, for example, Qiu employs multitudes of ink drawings and links them together in an animated form. The title itself refers to the ancient Chinese mythology Classic of the Mountains and Seas. Besides investigating the interaction between ancient and modern Chinese culture, this work and others like it have a dreamlike quality: the clearly delineated images framed by unbelievable narratives faithfully depict the absurdity of the world around us. This link to the everyday further enhances the political value of the work, which engages in a damning criticism of environmental degradation, social breakdown, and massive urbanization. Unlike younger artists, Qiu Anxiong does not indulge in the personal pleasures of the everyday, but rather takes the undifferentiated mass of history as his raw material.
Selected Public Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art New York. Art Museum of Brooklyn, New York Spenser Museum, Kansas University Museum of University Oxford, Kunst Halle Zurich, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Art Museum Hongkong, Astrup Fearnley Musum of Modern Art, Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum.
Head of China, Editorial and Marketing, Artsy
Sonia Xie is an art historian, journalist and writer. She is the China Head of Editorial and Marketing at Artsy, the leading technology platform in the art world, the magazine of which is the most widely read online arts editorial in the world. Prior to joining Artsy, Xie was the deputy editor-in-chief at the Art Newspaper China. Xie is also a regular contributor to influential media including Life Week, Sixth Tone, Nowness, Wallpaper, KINFOLK, Arbiter and ELLE. Xie received her bachelor’s degree in Art History, Italian Studies and Journalism, from Wheaton College (MA), and her Master of Arts in Art History, from University of Warwick.