Qiu Xiaofei is a young artist, born in 1977 in northeastern China’s Haerbin, who studied oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts until his graduation in 2002.

Qiu Xiaofei's artistic practice, which includes oil and watercolor painting, three-dimensional painting-sculpture, and installation, uniquely articulates the relationship between concept and aesthetics. His early work is largely concerned with the relationship between memory and history, the subjective nature of lived experience, the whimsical qualities of childhood, and the role of materiality in perception; his most recent work contemplates the power relations of art history, the theorization of the spectacle, and the work of the basic psychoanalytic apparatuses.

His paintings recall a dreamlike and blurry state of memory that bears only an impressionistic relationship to reality. Many are painted from photographs of the artist's own childhood, but the connection to history is more disjunctive than mimetic; indeed, the artist's remembrances bear a dauntingly complex relationship to the reproduction of either the real or the imagined image. Qiu Xiaofei expands these explorations in his sculptural paintings, which involve objects, usually toys or memories from an era already past, sculpted out of fiberglass and plastic and then painted over, lending them an altogether painterly appearance.

Qiu's work, however, moves far beyond any simple longing for the past, and even moves beyond a meditation on nostalgia for a time that never existed. Rather, these paintings, sculptures, and installations represent a complicated attempt to tease out precisely how experience is filtered through perception, how these perceptions are warped by time, how memory recall again filters experience, and how all of these processes together form the intertwining threads of the reality of a time that has passed.

His latest installation work pushes beyond his own experience into the realm of the confrontational; the nature of perception and experience are still at stake, but the new works additionally interrogate broader themes of power, media, and social pressure. The tactics most commonly used here are borrowed from surrealism. Qiu Xiaofei has become especially interested in creating an artistic space for the negotiation of the notions of authenticity and specularity raised first by Magritte and later debated by Foucault, as made evident in the rich layers of meaning in works as diverse as his early paintings of mass media products and newer massive building blocks.

Solo Exhibitions

2008 

House of Recollected Fragments, Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing, China         

2007 

Qiu Xiaofei: Recent Works, Gallery LOFT, Paris, France         

2006 

Heilongjiang Box, Art Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China   

Group Exhibitions   

2008

New World Order, Groninger Museum, Groninger, The Netherlands
Pagoda of the Discarded, Art & Public, Geneva, Switzerland
Red Aside, Joan Miro Foundation, Barcelona, Spain
Subtlety, Platform China, Beijing, China

2007

International Education Expo, Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan, China
The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China, Tate Livepool, Livepool, Great Britain
Art Basel 38, Basel, Switzerland
ShContemporary: Best Discovery, Shanghai, China
Energies - Synergy, Belgium
Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves, ZKM Museum, Karlsruhe, Germany

2006

Replacement, Chinese Contemporary Gallery, Beijing, China
Chaos City, UniversalStudios, Beijing, China
Out of Order, F2 Gallery, Beijing, China
N12 New Painting No. 4, C5 Art, Beijing, China

2005

Mahjong: Contemporary Art from the Sigg Collection, Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland
Scapes: The “Century” and the “Paradise,” 2005 Chengdu Biennial, Chengdu, China
Up and Down the River: Retrospective Exhibition of Chinese Oil Painting, China National Museum of Fine Arts, Beijing, China
N12 New Painting No.3, Art Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China
Naughty Kids, Star Gallery, Beijing, China
Expression, Middle Space, Luoyang, China
Steamship, Free Exchange Bookstore, Beijing, China
Welcome, Welcome, Base Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

2004

Feel Memory, Yibo Gallery, Shanghai, China
Painting, Top Space, Beijing, China
Together, Chinablue Gallery, Beijing, China
N12 New Painting No.2, Art Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China
Reading, Free Exchange Bookstore, Beijing, China
Entrance, Aura Gallery, Shanghai, China

2003

N12 New Painting, Art Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts,Beijing, China
Third Chinese Oil Painting Exhibition, China National Museum of Fine Arts, Beijing, China

2001 

Back, Beijing Contemporary Art Museum, Beijing, China         

2000 

The Second Factory Time, Yun Feng Gallery, Beijing, China