The everyday: What is most difficult to discover. These words from Maurice Blanchot, written in 1962, define a concept whose power transcends schools of thought, neither subject nor object, present nor past. According to Blanchot the concept of the everyday was eminently difficult to discover precisely because at each moment of it's becoming it escapes our attempts to comprehend it. Lefebvre on the other hand argues that everyday life is an invisible residue, devoid of truth and beyond the grasp of thought and language; it resists translation into verbal and visual media. As such, the concept of the everyday has emerged as a potential substitute for, if not an improvement on, such keywords as culture, practice, experience, totality and modernity.

The practice of artist Qiu Zhijie is neatly situated at this junction, where the personal meets the collective, absence meets presence and the temporal gaps that exist between past, present and future coalesce. Trained in the printmaking department of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou , Qiu is well known for his contemporary practices that often mix calligraphy with more modern media like photography, video and installation. His recent solo show Archaeology of Memory 俼š (2007) at the Long March Space in Beijing 's 798 district is centered on a work called Monuments  which combines calligraphy rubbings, video and sculptural elements into a large scale installation. Often incorporating aspects of time into his work, Qiu's projects embody a constant state of becoming or in the case of Monuments , repetitive acts that embody a constant state of disappearance. Monuments [FIG. 3] consists of a series of concrete blocks, each containing 16 layers approximately 10 cm thick. The artist carved characters into a given layer of concrete, waited for it to dry and then created a series of ink rubbings. After the set of rubbings were made, another layer of concrete was added (covering the previous layer and thereby rendering it obsolete) and another set of characters were carved, continuing the process until finally the 17 th layer of concrete was added to seal off the block. The end result is a square block of concrete, accompanied by 16 rubbings, each representing a different layer of text and point in time.

The content and style of Qiu's rubbings range dramatically, with the artist drawing upon source material as diverse as revolutionary slogans from years past and famous quotations by political leaders to personal letter and notes. Each is rendered in the hands of different calligraphers, lending further associations of meaning and interpretation. Of particular interest are Monuments: Personal Letters and Notes źֽ and Monuments: Emails received in Scrambled Code յʼ , two series of rubbings that focus on the everyday life of the artist. [FIG. 4, 5] Dedicating such an elaborate process of carvings and rubbings to such commonplace items might seem bizarre, but in this context serve to remind us of the different spheres of language that inhabit our lives. Giving the same status to these mundane exchanges as to the loaded titles of modern publications New Youth or Signs of the Times, and revolutionary slogans of previous generations, the artist constructs a seamless merging of personal experience of everyday life with the political.

In addition to combining the shifting and intangible forces of personal and collective memory with the decidedly permanent material of concrete; Qiu constructs a way for these memories to be enshrined through the creation of a monument: a monument to the everyday. Political referencesrevolutionary slogans, Republican period publications, popular quotations by political leaders and intellectual thinkers, intertwined with the personalhandwritten notes, karaoke song lists and jumbled email messages, remind us that the everyday resides in neither work, leisure nor private life but in the totality of social interactions. These interactions, Qiu observes, are often mediated by language.

Language and writing have long played an integral role in Qiu Zhijie's artworks. Calligraphy in particular, has formed a core element of his practice, both as daily activity and as the foundation of a larger methodology that transcends mere material and form. From Qiu's earlier known works Copying the Lanting Xu 1000 Times (1990-1997), to April 8, 1999 to more recent calligraphy light-writing photography works, the written word acts as a marker for notions of memory, history, and individual experience. It also functions as a valuable index of time. The use of calligraphy in the Monuments series, unlike his photography works which demonstrate impermanence and isolated fragments of time recorded on film, aspire instead for permanence and preservation. It would be easy to compare Qiu to other contemporary artists who have taken aim at deconstructing or reconstructing the authority of the written word in Chinese history, i.e. Xu Bing, Gu Wenda or Wu Shanzhuan. But Qiu's Monuments series takes a different tack, using words to construct meaning and language as way to lament and preserve the past. This reminds us of Lefebvre's assertion:

Nothing dies in the everyday.[] It may occur to us, however, that if nothing dies in the everyday it is because in daily life everything is already dead; a repetitive existence buried under its own repetition, both unfamiliar and too well known, hidden under the tired rhetoric of banalized discourse. Is there everyday lifeor everyday death?

By inscribing words onto a permanent surface and then sealing it off from future use, Qiu's words are preserved in perpetuity. His history of the everyday has become the archaeology of an everyday lost.

Calligraphy rubbings in Chinese tradition carry strong associations of remembrance and loss. The practice of making rubbings developed from copying early examples of text carved into ancient stone stele, with such stele characteristically acting as memorials or markers of abandoned sites and/or commemorated historical events. Existing as a form of ancient remains, these stele often lamented the past through written words carved into their surface. These words, as representative examples of famous calligraphers, were repeatedly copied and passed through centuries, slowly becoming part of the present. Qiu employs the form of ink rubbings and all their associative meaning to memorialize ordinary events, revealing how everyday life resides not in time as it is lived day-to-day, but in decade or century long continuities.

Blanchot, Maurice. Everyday Speech Susan Hanson, trans. Yale French Studies , no. 73 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) ,12

Lefebvre, Henri. The Critique of Everyday Life . Trans. John Moore. (New York: Verso Books, 1991), 67