Val Wang

Choosing a favorite work of art would be hard for a prolific artist like Qiu Zhijie, but after a moment's thought, he names his installation "Xin/Jin," ("Heart/Scripture") exhibited in Taiwan in 1999. For it, he covered the walls with a Buddhist scripture teaching one on how to liberate one's heart, written in ink only visible in white light. After five seconds, the white light abruptly switched to an overhead light, illuminating the human heart floating in a glass jar on a stand, then five seconds later, just as your eyes adjusted, the white light eased back on.

He delightedly shows a videotape of the installation 0A where a woman, as soon as the heart springs to view, grabs her own heart in shock. By having viewers physically experience the contrast between physical and intellectual ways to conceptualize the heart, he is betraying his opposition to art that is merely conceptual. If you don't have to read Chinese, says Qiu, you might not fully understand the text, but it won't prevent you from being affected by the work. This work is teaching 0A you how to think of art as the way to not only understand the human heart, but to affect it and, by saying it is his favorite, Qiu is congratulating himself for successfully balancing the two.

According to Qiu, Chinese contemporary art is too affected by Duchamp, too preoccupied with the desires of artists to prove that they're smart. Though he is well-versed in Western theories and much of his art has revolved around philosophical problems such as the limits 0A of the ability to know and to think he says, "I want to do the kind of art that makes even your skin react, not your brain, the kind that surrounds people, makes people's whole bodies react."

He has recently been making video art and CD-ROMs and is attuned to the sacrifices that new media requires to this endeavor of balancing the conceptual with the powerful. Though he can be more independent, working on his computer at any time, and he doesn't have to make as many compromises, he believes the works are err on the conceptual side. "There isn't a limit on the space or time of this, only on the size of the file, and it can be exhibited in many spaces, but can't address the problems of the body. There's nothing you can do about this." He believes the technology is still too limited to move people. An exception to his rule is Bill Viola's slow-mo video installation of simple actions 0A like a drop of water falling. Qiu admires the way that it completely controls your body and changes an inconsequential occurrence into a drama that the viewers watch like a good play.

The CD-ROM he has been working on for a few months is called "The West" containing video clips of people talking about different topics about "the West" -- kids on Christmas and McDonald's, hairdressers on the NATO bombing, college students on the TOEFL. It also includes Qing Dynasty artistic renditions of encounters with the West and historical video clips. He gets at the conflicts and contradictions inherent in these thoughts. One student says that after the NATO bombing, students decided not to take the TOEFL, but then later regretted it and at the next registration, the lines snaked out the building.

Though Qiu is aware of the flawed concept of "the West," he persists with it because he says it echoes the monolithic way that people here view the outside world. This work is a more sociological piece "about how people's thinking is limited by education, history, reality," says Qiu, drawing similarities to his photograph series "Good" 0A where two men adopt stagey positions facilitated and determined by the poles they are carrying. Qiu says he doesn't believe that the technology necessarily allows him to say something new, but rather just extend this earlier work.

The CD-ROM is messily assembled in PowerPoint and allows the viewer choices, from "The Good West," "The Bad West" and "The Real West." However, Qiu states adamantly that being interactive is not necessarily good in itself. To him, it mark a loss of control over the artwork, forcing the work itself to acquiesce to market demands.

And for the free hand of the artist to be restricted by market demands means that he cannot fulfill his responsibility, which is to reorganize reality into an experience more powerful than reality. Qiu recently curated an exhibition entitled "New Conceptual Photography: China Scene" that was exhibited in the atrium of the Century Theater in Beijing. In his own work, "Landscape" he spliced together footage of himself as he spun around in different places he's traveled, creating the effect that he's standing still and the background is whirling and switching around behind him. Though it was a fairly simple demonstration of the Chinese understanding of travel, he says, "I put different spaces together, at least... and used my face as a reference point, so it was 0A like having a dream. You enter here, exit there. It has a stronger feeling than your regular life. Time and space have been reorganized, so then you can say it's art."

Qiu is, by his own admission, a traditionalist, borrowing ideas about knowledge and time from Buddhism. For his other exhibited work, he spent a year making a calendar called "Calendar 1998." For each month, he split a photograph into 30 or 31 pieces and each day of the month took part of the whole photograph. The resulting picture shows the photo reconstructed, but with each day being taken on a different day. "The Chinese think, or at least I do, that every day is important and yet isn't that important," he says. "I used this method to emphasize that you should look carefully at every place."

He compares this approach to a Western philosophical approach, where something is "important because there's something beneath it. In China, it's important because of its relation to other things You can say it's not important, but it can't be replaced."

Qi is a voluble and enthusiastic talker, but he is at his most serene when talking about philosophy. "Every day what you encounter is what we Chinese call fate. Today I meet you, tomorrow I meet someone else," he says. "Everything, no matter how small, every time, no matter how short, is fated, so you should earnestly approach it."

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