Qiu Zhijie - Life and Work

Life and Work

Qiu Zhijie was born in 1969 in Fujian province, China. Zhijie graduated from the printmaking department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou in 1992. Soon after, Zhijie was developing his technical and conceptual skills, as seen in his graduate work A New Life (1992). The installation featured 16 glass panels of different sizes on which texts, slogans, and figures were printed. The installation create a translucent labyrinth from these panels, which allowed the audience to take part in the work as their bodies filled the clear sections of the glass panels. Qiu's work in A New Life developed the basis for later works including Bathroom (1997) and his Tattoo series (1994). The Tattoo series in particular further explored the concept of free-floating symbols and words that were imposed on the individual. The imposition of the external world onto the individual for better or worse is also featured in his Rainbow photography series.

Beyond symbols, icons, and external pressures, Zhijie has explored the concept of transience in many of his works. Zhijie's Baguo series of photographs, for instance, displays scenes of streets with market stalls and buildings, but the streets are filled with ghostly half-transparent roaming figures. These "ghosts" imply a sense that they are coming and going but never stationary enough to make a lasting impression, as the buildings have. Zhijie's Propagator in the Darkness lithograph also presents this theme. The lithograph displays a skeleton shouting through a megaphone inside a bell. Regarding this work, Zhijie has said "No one can see him or hear him, but he's still showing his propaganda slogan. For me this is about sounds disappearing, about the past disappearing. Whether it's good or not, we don't know. It's quite a complicated feeling."

According to Qiu Zhijie in an interview from 2001, the most significant turning point in his career was his work producing the installation Public Life/Glass Toilet (1994), which led to an ongoing interest in revealing the otherwise obscured practices of art production.

Qiu Zhijie is an accomplished author of Art theory books. his published books include as “Image and Post-modernism”, “Give Me A Mask”, “The Boundary of Freedom”, “The Scene is Most Important”, “Photography After Photography”, and “Basic Course in Total Art Creation”.

Qiu Zhijie is currently a professor at the School of Inter-media Art of China Art Academy, the Director of Total Art Studio and member of the supervisor team in the Art and Social Thoughts Institute. Zhijie has also curated “Phenomena and Image” in 1996, a series of exhibitions with the theme of “Post-sense Sensibility” between 1999 and 2004, “Long March, A Walking Visual Display” in 2002, and the video portion of the First Guangzhou Triennial and “Archeology of Future: The Second Triennial of Chinese Art” in 2005.

Zhijie has been teaching in the Total Art Studio of China Academy of Art since 2003. He has proposed ways to develop the concept of “total art” in both formal academic and professional contexts.