He is a pioneering figure in bringing animated films into the context of contemporary Chinese art. His works employs different kinds of mediums including animation, painting, installation and video, etc.;

His works have been collected by Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Denmark, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, Art Museum, Hong Kong, Spencer Museum, Kansas, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, etc.;

He received the CCAA Contemporary Art Award in 2006 and founded the Museum of Unkown in 2007. He took part in the exhibition Ink Art held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2013.

When I was in art school, the teacher of classical literature recommended us The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera in the first class. “Lightness and heaviness” is the core topic of this novel. His novels sometimes slip into philosophical thoughts, and this is why some people do not like him that much. Nevertheless, I was obsessed with the philosophical ideas reflected by different destinies of people in the history. At that time, there was no doubt that heaviness was the base of our lives. From the nation to individuals, everything was a heavy and difficult trek, but there had been a “light” future waving at us.

Our vision for future was a sparkling and modernized one radiating plastic light. In the early 1980s, there was a popular children’s science fiction called Xiaolingtong Manyou Weilai (PHS wandering the future). It depicts a magical and wonderful future. Cars are not grounded but flying, and when two cars meet, one car can just elevate and fly above the other. Hovercrafts are amphibious, and the flying cars are actually small-sized hovercrafts. Watches do not have hands, but a small screen showing numbers. Skyscrapers in grotesque shapes are standard in future cities.

The vertical farms in buildings are like interior rain forests. All the plants there are huge and tall, and sunflowers can be as tall as redwoods. These subjective imaginations were all visible in the propaganda during Great Leap Forward period: a member of the people’s commune rides a bull-sized pig, or a pumpkin that is as big as a room. The view at vertical farm appears like a factory—there are no farmers cultivating under the sun, but engineer-like people who control the growth of crops with buttons on instruments. This is a representation of advancement at the time, of course with the imagination toward space wandering. Although information was relatively blocked in China at the time, the landing of Apollo on moon was still known. In the book, furniture pieces are all made of plastic, and are light and durable.

I loved reading this book when I was little, imagining a modernized future like a floating and sparkling balloon while living in a time only for basic survival. That point of time for future was 2000, and we imagined that all these would be real in 2000. In fact, those sci-fi imaginations had existed in the West, such as space flights, hovercrafts, and flying cars. Electronic watches did not take much time to become a cheap item that was available everywhere. Today we are eating fruits and vegetables grown with growth agents and are used to the skyscrapers. These have not brought the happiness we imagined. Conversely, we now want to eat organic food without additives and growth agents, and we are more willing to live in a grounded house with a courtyard and garden. Things that were unexpected by the book also happened, such as smart phones, internet, and everything it brings.

The change of Chinese people’s lives since the 1970s is the biggest and the most special in the history. From an agricultural society that relied on lands, we entered into a mixture of agricultural, industrial, post-industrial, and informational societies. Our lives have become lighter. We can now solve most issues of our lives through smartphones. If you want to eat, we can open food delivery apps, and the food will arrive in your hands soon. If you want to buy clothes and groceries, you do not need to go to a shopping mall and to different stores, because there will be thousands of items available on e-commerce platforms. You do not need to travel for paying different fees, including traffic tickets, since you can get it done on payment apps. These indeed save us a lot of time. We do not need to feel the difficulties of tasks, because we can now finish all the tasks lying on a couch. All we need is a cable connecting to the outside world. We can also participate in important social events lying on a couch, “give directions to the world”—all of these have become so simple and easy.

We spend a majority of time in our lives looking at the phone screens. On the one hand, we use social media to watch other people’s lives. On the other hand, we show our lives through it. Of course, what we see on the screens are all filtered, polished, and covered lives, not the whole image of the real lives. On screens, all we see everyday is the carnival of life. To some extent, our lives have been replaced by “performing lives” and “imitating lives”. Our lives have to have content that is worthy to be shown off to be posted on social media. Meanwhile, ordinary content is not worthy or negligible, because it does not appear like a “spectacle” enough. What Guy Debord decribed as “the society of the spectacle” has been internalized in every corner of our lives. Through this spectacular way, our lives have become content of platformers, the products. Just like a saying about the internet, “if what you use on the internet is free, then probably you are the product.” Your actions will all be converted into data streams, and these data streams are the most important resources of internet giants. Lives on the screen are mostly relaxed, happy, and adorable, but they also have pains. Those exposed pains are not the regular ones, but the ones that have charateristics of spectacles. They have to be shocking. Pains can become some type of performance. Therefore, it does not matter if it is happiness or a pain. If it can draw people’s attention, the media will take it. Social media platforms are similar to a tao tie (mythical gluttonous monster) that devours everything as long as it can bring the traffic. Everyone’s life has been involved into this endless carnival show.

The undramatic life has been hidden behind the screens. This has created a separation of our lives: the visible and the invisible lives. In the visible lives, our shows are energetic and delightful. On the other hand, the mechanical, repetitive, and trivial tasks, work, and anxieties are all covered in the invisible lives for us to digest. The lightness and heaviness of lives are split up in this way that the visible lives are light and the invisible ones are heavy. All we see on social media is the light part—the light, easy, and sparking lives on WeChat and Instagram. The longer time we spend on social media, the deeper we fall for it. Our lives do not have anything empty anymore, and all of the time is filled by information. When we are not giving a performance of our lives we are watching other people’s performances of their lives. Internet constructs a weightless world. It is not only a weight loss of life, but also our feelings toward time. The fragmented information has shattered the continuity of time. Only what happens at a moment can attract netizens' attention, while yesterday has been forgotten. In the internet society, the shorter and more stimulating the information, the more effective it is. Long and rational knowledge has been left behind. In this sense, we have lost the depth of time, let alone a sense of history. The weight of time is gradually disappearing during this weightless era.

How It Flows On presents this topic of lightness and heaviness. Two thousand years ago, Confucius watched the flowing river exclaimed “how it flows on”. It was a sentiment toward the passing time, and how time flies like the flowing water. Standing next to the Huangpu River, the Riverside Passage is a witness and sculptor of time. The transparent screen sets the Huangpu River as a background of time. The passing people and objects in the animation on the screen are all the passersby in the river of time. The suspension and weightlessness reflect a common feeling in this generation when virtual reality is becoming stronger and more indispensable. Breaking free from gravity and flying like a bird are always dreamed by humans. Tales such as Icarus’ wings and Solomon’s flying carpet are all the representations of this dream. Today, it is a norm to take flights for travel, and people like Elon Musk are thinking about moving into a new space age. Although only a few people have experienced the state of weightlessness in space, but most people are now familiar with the associated icons through the vast media promotion of these breaking news of the age.

How It Flows On animation clip

On the other hand, the weightless feeling provided by the virtual reality in the online world has become a more common feeling. The netizens in the online space feel freer and stronger than they do in the actual world. This is a type of breaking free from the constraints of gravity, but is it really a freedom? In this work, the suspended state of people and objects is not a reflection of free minds. They look like marionettes, and cannot help moving futilely in the air. This appears more like a loss of control than freedom. In a sense, these spontaneous bodies are all data streams, and everyone’s movement is eventually converted into a data stream, becoming a digit of the weightless digital world. Through algorithm, these digits turn back and control human behaviors. Today’s new mankind does not share the same destiny with Sisyphus anymore. Because everything has lost its weight in the new world, that rock of Sisyphus does not roll down the hill but floats to the void.

March, 2021

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 at East China Normal University. His works employ different kinds of mediums including animation, painting, installation and video, etc. Representative works are animation films 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 Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum.