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He spent more than a decade working on a trilogy called "The New Classic of Mountains and Seas", drawing from the traditional Chinese mythology "The Book of Mountains and Seas".
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Qiu Anxiong's practice adopts different artistic mediums, including animation, painting, installation, and video. He adopts traditional Chinese humanism combined with new media forms to convey his thoughts on cultural history and contemporary society. He is dedicated to the research on interplays between Chinese tradition and modern culture. He is an active force in the construction of contemporary art ecology in recent years.
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As his most representative work of Qiu Anxiong, the trilogy New Classic of Mountains and Seas presents Qiu Anxiong's most profound concerns and contemplation on the human condition. He places the past in the present with an eye for the future, questioning the compromise that the environment, traditional values and the entire human civilization may have to made for the rapid developments in society and technology.
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New Classics of Mountains and Seas is a video work that Qiu Anxiong began in 2006, based on the traditional Chinese mythology, The Book of Mountains and Seas. The series continues until 2017, forming into a trilogy. The first (New Classic of Mountains and Seas) consists of more than a thousand ink paintings. The artist lyrically expands on the energy conflict, which was at the heart of the conflict of national interests in the last century. The piece adopts tradition and modernity as intertexts to depict the absurd peripatetic world in which people live. The work comprises of multi-layered histories from different temporality and spatiality, where ancient and modern subjects intersect.
In the second part of the New Classic of Mountains and Seas, completed in 2007, the artist again uses traditional ink and wash methods to create a nightmarish "animal machine." It suggests a world in which the ecosystem driven by humans has collapsed, a world in which creatures whose genes have been tampered with and deformed by erosion, which perished on Earth and fled to outer space. Biotechnology and space technology is at the heart of Qiu Anxiong’s thematic exploration. He presents the viewer with a humanitarian crisis brought about by science and technology on both micro and macro scales.
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The third part (New Classic of Mountain and Sea), completed in 2017 after 10 years in the making, is an amalgamation of the artist's panoramic perspective on the crises of humanity. In place of an eschatological future, the environment deteriorates rapidly, and humankind plunges into virtual reality. The barren and grotesque landscape prevalent in this work is a prophetic warning to those watching. The artist presents this dystopian world to people, an extreme and pernicious form of the future society, contrary to human ideals.
Qiu Anxiong
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.
His work has been collected by The Museum of Modern Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, Spencer Museum of Art, the University of Kansas, Kunst Halle Bern, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation, Uli Sigg, Haudenschild Collection.