Interview of Qiu Zhijie
 

Place: Qiu Zhijie's Studio in Fei Jia Cun

People: Qiu Zhijie, Petra Jason, Cao yongjie, Gu Hualin

Cao: It's a great honor to be able to have an interview with you today. Mr. Qiu, I'd like to know how you got involved with the Artist Link programme. Were you invited or you got this information yourself?

Qiu: It is Li Qiaoqian who talked me into the whole thing. Currently in Beijing the market for art is blooming and every artist is very busy for people come to them for art work every day. It seems like a lost if I leave Beijing for other places, such as teaching in Hang Zhou. But there is some problem in this thriving city that seems to be thriving with numerous opportunities. In fact I do think it necessary to leave Beijing regularly to do things less commercial. That's why I go to Hang Zhou and do some teaching there for six weeks every year. And that means I am still with art though physically away from the hustle and bustle of Beijing. I do not have a specific plan of where to go though.

I got an unexpected call from Li Qiaoqian, who bought my three books published as a set in 2003. She asked me whether I was interested in participating in the Art Link programme because she, after reading my books, thought I was very qualified for it. I was quite hesitant then because there was not such a thing that I must do or must not do. So I said, OK, post your work to me. I'd like to have a look. And that's how the whole thing got started. Normally London is the must place to go if you visit Britain instead of staying in the remote small village for such a long time. But I said, It's cool. Let's go. So it's Li Qiaoqian's work that made my visit of Britian reality.

I hadn't expected Dartington to be such a good college before I went there. I even had not thought about what I was going to do in Dartington. I wanted to be in a quiet place where I could clear up my mind. Actually I just wanted to take a vacation there because it must have a beautiful landscape and the life rhythm is slower than that in London, Beijing and Shanghai. I can do some thinking and do some editing work to an important book. My work in Dartington conflicted with my preparation for the Tri-annual Exhibition in Guangzhou. But on a second thought, I guess it's how life works----because what I did in Dartington and for the Tri-annual Exhibition in Guangzhou are both trans-time and space. As an artist, you have to solve such problems whether you meet them involuntarily, or you are pushed to face them or you choose to confront these problems yourself. The certain environment you are in would become one of the sources of your creation. You have to solve the problems in the process of creation. That's how I went to Dartington. I was pushed and moved by Li Qiaoqian.

Cao: Is it true that Li Qiaoqian was doing her own programme out there?

Qiu: The dean of the college is a fan of China. You know that college is not as internationalized as London. The white people constitute the majority with very few colored people. Li Qiaoqian is the only Chinese and one of the two Asians on campus. But fortunately she becomes the favourite of the dean among all the post-graduates because, on the one hand, the dean happens to be crazy about China, and on the other hand, she is very good at organization due to her work experience in China. The dean has maintained constant contacts with China so he grows more dependent on Li Qiaoqian. In this sense Li Qiaoqian stands out among the postgraduates. It seems that this college took the initiative to participate when Artist Link was about to lunch this programme. I think they are good, and perhaps the best among all the organizations involved in the Artist Link. Their participation also leads to many other events. Anyway, their college does play a very important role in this programme.

Gu: Before you went there, had you planned to finish any work there?

Qiu: Yes, I had a plan. But when I got there, I found that my original plan was not feasible. According to the materials provided by Li Qiaoqian, Devon has something to do with porcelain, which has always been my interest. So my original plan was to make some ceramic tiles first, then draw a picture on each of them, and finally glue them onto a wall to make the whole as an animated picture. The reason why I had wanted to do this is related to the exported business of China porcelain. But it turned out that the place where they make the porcelain is different from my imagination. Another plan is that I hope I can . Let me put it this way. I do multi-media performance and live art in China; and I know this college is very good in its major of theatre and very effective in trans-field collaboration according to the materials posted by Li Qiaoqian. So we both want some interaction in this area. For instance, to see what can be achieved by working with the students majoring in theatre. But when I got there, I found that I could get it done in six weeks. My visit almost approached its end when the people there got to know me and those who were interested in me began to talk about the work with me. Six weeks is much too short for collaboration. But I think this time is much better.

Cao: Could you tell us how you develop effective collaboration with the students there and give some introduction of the works you have achieved?

Qiu: I was impressed with their arrangements for me. They took me to visit museums and porcelain collection, for I had asked them before. It is the unplanned part that turned out to be a great motivation for me. You have been in the Space of Long March and saw the work of Camouflage Lion, which was finished at the end of September in Yokohama before my visit to Britain in November. The essence of the series of works about camouflage is in fact a discussion of cultural relations and Sino-Japan relations, for example, how Chinese people in China Town in Yokohama have interactions with the local Japanese culture while maintaining an independent identification. Under some circumstances, they would turn to be an army in ambush. China Town thus becomes a target of observation and an ambiguous gray area. Before I went to Dartington, I had been thinking about camouflage. But I didn't expect to go back to this issue there. The first unexpected thing was that wow, they have milk cows here! I said jokingly to Li Qiaoqian when I saw the milk cow, The milk cows are not in harmony with the environment at all. Normally animals which live on grass will take on a green color as camouflage color. But milk cows are in striking black and white, which is obviously not beneficial to survival. They are actually artificial crossbreed. The second unexpected thing is that there are layers of leaves on the ground. Camouflage is everywhere. With these two surprises, I found myself not interested in the porcelain they showed to me. I was taken to visit Eden Project ------- a big greenhouse with various plants, where I noticed the great importance that the Britain people have attached to gardening. It seems a British man who does not know how to do gardening is not a real man. I knew nothing about the gardening in Britain. So my only demand when I was in Dartington was the access to Internet. I read a lot online and got to know that there are two things that must be contained in the culture of gardening. One is the definition of what nature is and the other is its close relations with colonialism--- Britain used to have colonies worldwide, which enabled them to transplant various species back into Britain. That has something to do with museums and natural museums. This issue greatly raised my interest. When I was in Dartington, I also cared for my work in China and wrote up a very important article on Chinese calligraphy. I participated in a symposium on calligraphy before my trip to Dartington and heard the saying that Chinese calligraphy must take the road of how Japanese contemporary calligraphy develops. I totally disagree with that opinion. So I wrote up this article. When I was writing and looking at the grassland out of the window, the words in Evolution and Ethics by Huxley quoted in an article written by Lu Xun suddenly occurred to me: It may be safely assumed that, two thousand years ago, before Caesar set foot in southern Britain, the whole country-side visible from the windows of the room in which I write, was in what is called "the state of nature." Except, it may be, by raising a few sepulchral mounds, such as those which still, here and there, break the flowing contours of the downs, man's hands had made no mark upon it; and the thin veil of vegetation which overspread the broad-backed heights and the shelving sides of the combs was unaffected by his industry. I kept thinking of how those various species competed with each other for survival while I was writing. Actually the environment where I did the writing had some resemblance with that where Huxley wrote his Revolution and Ethics --- both in a wild field somewhere in the southwest of England. He mentioned how t he native grasses and weeds contended with one another for water, soil and nutrition. The sentence they (the native grasses and weeds) fought against the droughts of summer and the frosts of winter means that they have to fight against the wind above and against the insects beneath. And this shifted my attention to the consideration of nature and revolution, which goes naturally with the idea of camouflage. And camouflage is a result of revolution and of species selection; it is also a constant process of self-remodeling. All these thinking became the guide lines of the research in Dartington. Later I saw the milk cows and got to know that they are artificial crossbreeds of black cows and white cows in Dutch. My way of doing the work goes like this. The main part of it is a fresco, of which I made a copy when I was back here. On the fresco, there are milk cows, zebras, penguins. I also collected many leaves which have something to do with the camouflage uniforms. I dyed some of the leaves into black and white and put them on the ground in the shape of a milk cow. I also put a football beside. On the opening ceremony, a visitor kicked the football which sent the mosaic milk cow back into a pile of leaves. On the wall was pasted the information of how the milk cows have evolved. Of course the choice of this topic is related with the mad cow disease in Britain as well, which also has something to do with evolution. In fact after the appearance of mad cow disease, the minister of American Agriculture Department made a suggestion that a label of DNA should be attached to every milk cow. You can imagine the massive scale of an art work because of that. The space for exhibition is usually not big; otherwise I would have shown a much bigger and more complex work.