White Box Museum of Art & JOYART are proud to present “Light and Dust”, Qiu Qijing’s solo exhibition. The White Box Museum will present his latest blue and white porcelain & white jade series of works. The style of these works can be traced to the Chinese classical culture and oriental art and the fact that he uses very precious materials became an exhibition that everyone should take into consideration. At the same time, JOYART will exhibit more than 500 pieces of seal works which took more than 5 years to be completed. With this massive realization, Qiu tries to interpret the depth of our humanity influenced by the traditional Patriarchal society and natural human’s desire.
In 2007, Qiu Qijing’s installation “Migration” brought the Shoushan stone sculpture from the traditional handicraft works into Contemporary art. In this way, thanks to his young imagination, the artist put traditional sculpture into a new fresh dimension.
The Shoushan stone is one of the most important kind of material used in sculpture of the Fu Jian province, but still the craftsmen are living in a very traditional condition. Today, thanks to Qiu Qijing’s “Migration” and the “Seal” series, we assist on an evolution of the stone sculptures: his works crush the traditional craftsmen’s concepts by using one more actual.
Qiu Qijing once affirmed: “How many barriers we have borken, and how many steps we hade taken to reach today’s civilization. Although desire might be the most terrifying enemy of mankind, but it is also the strongest energy to our civilization, which tempts the most primitive desires, at the same time, it somehow like a huge magnet to attract every moral aspects of mankind and sins. Through his works, we can felt the self-examination about the spiritual subject and force us to face a very sharp question: the condition of our lives”.
While we watch “Light and Dust”, we can eventually discover the turning point of the artist’s style into an Asian aesthetic. Previously, his style was more contemporary. As in the “Migration” series, we can realize how the work’s structure, the creation process and the installation, completely belong to a current style. It already breaks the common sense of our understanding as a piece of “work”, it is more like incidents of creation in a more broaden view, which gives to the artist the chance to express his academic point of view. However, his newest works are completely different from the past; we can see the difficult choice that the artist made between the values of oriental cultures and the western values. Moreover, we can see that he gave up many materials and sculpture styles, just like we evict viruses from our body, and from now on Qiu Qijing’s works can express his sensitivity and remembrance of his culture by focus on the oriental anesthetic’s naturalism.
Qiu Qijing’s works were created during a period with a great collisions between different cultures. He did not intentionally try to follow the main stream of today’s creation, and he is never been a worshipper of the traditional concepts, but he tries to find a distinctive style to re-examine the natural transformation of the world. Therefore, we can see his deep effort on creating incisive works that can defy and challenge the traditional craftsmen styles. This oversteps the difference between men and cultures to find a way to express in a contemporary language our spiritual condition.
We can affirm that Qiu Qijing’s work “Light and Dust” presents the trace of the turning point of the artist’s thought, and, through this process, he achieved the traditional concept of purification in which through the practice, the artist escapes from reality to reach a transcendental condition. Facing the rapid changes of nowadays society, the main topic of contemporary art became the description of people’s life and their personal conditions, but this topic about reality can change its own form preferring a more spiritual aspect more than a visual one.
