On November 28th, we invited artist Qiu Anxiong and ARTSY China's Content and Marketing Director, Sonia Xie, to present the forum "What do you want to know the most about contemporary art ?" On this occasion, we have also screened artist Qiu Anxiong’s featured animation film, New Classics of Mountains and Seas I.

Last week we conducted a public survey for artist Qiu Anxiong on two questions (What do you want to know the most about contemporary art? What do you find most puzzling about contemporary art?) We have selected and divided the questions we received into four topics: criteria for judging contemporary art, on art practice, the relationship between art and the public, and the art market. The two guest speakers shared their experiences of working in the art industry with us and their responses to the questions.

We have compiled the key points made by Qiu Anxiong and Sonia Xie during the forum.

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.