By Meiling Cheng

Presented at the PSi 14, in the University of Copenhagen

23 August 2008

Act I, Scene i: Recycling Visuality

Two workers circulate inside an archaeological dig, which occupies the entire first-floor loft space (23 x 8 ? x 5 meters) of Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art 's Exhibition Hall B. The archaeological site is composed of several layers of plateaus, connected with stairs. Viewers are encouraged to enter the cave, explore its soft black coal-covered surfaces and various reclusive corners, and pass through it to enter other exhibition halls on the second floor. Littered all over the coal-paved grounds are life-sized sculpted bodies of crows, made out of the same substance that sculpted the cave. Most viewers cannot help but trample on these sightless fallen crows as they seek footholds. Mediation, however, is in place. When any mass of crows gets flattened, the workers move to shovel up their shapeless remains, bring the ashes back to a central worktable, and put the coal remnants into a plastic mold to produce more crows. The workers then scatter these newly made crows along the path, allowing them to be smashed--yet again--by random footprints. This cycle of molding, crashing and remolding crows continues.

Act II: Sampling Total Art

The above live performance appeared in the exhibition entitled, The Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi (8 July-24 August 2008) by the Beijing-based multimedia artist, Qiu Zhijie. This solo exhibition is itself the first installment of a massive project, coordinated under the general title, Qiu Zhijie: A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangzi River Bridge , which comprises an ongoing series of cultural fieldworks, historical documentations, sociological investigations, cross-media artworks, and international exhibitions--all in response to the status of the Nanjing Bridge as China's most popular suicide location. Forecasting what is more to come, the Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi combines Qiu's four artistic orientations: the archival; the interventionist; the aesthetic/conceptual; and the ethical/philosophical. Correspondingly, the exhibition is divided into four display sections, identified as "Archive"; "Clinic"; "Think Tank"; and "Crystalloid." The art mediums represented here, as comprehensive as their contents, range from drawing, calligraphy, printmaking, sculpture, installation, photography, video, to performance.

Judging by the ways that different parts of this show resonate thematically like variant movements in a symphony, I take The Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi more as a singular opus than as a conventional retrospective exhibition. I find it most fruitful to approach this show as a sample of Qiu's "total art," a praxis that the artist has been developing since 2003, both for his own career and with his students at the Chinese Art Academy in Zhejiang . Qiu defines total art as an artistic practice based on cultural research, which turns to concrete sociocultural events as catalysts for art-making, so as to proactively affect the viewers' daily lives (see Qiu 20 July 2008). The quest of total art is to create efficacious art actions that offer new perspectives against fixed or biased opinions and critique mainstream sociocultural values. Thus, as Qiu asserts, the live site for his total art is the ongoing history itself.

According to Qiu, his concept for total art germinates from his extensive experiences as a curator, practitioner, and critic/theorist for live and new media art in the 1990s and early 2000s. Indeed, part of his capacity as a total artist is to assume many roles: an investigator, a creator, a thinker, an activist, a teacher, a poet, a healer, and a collaborator, from compiling archives to collecting castaways, from composing philosophical treatises to snapping pictures. Qiu as a total artist is, in short, a cultural archaeologist who not only dig into the historical past and present, but also sculpt toward the future. The archaeological performance that he directed in Zendai MoMA is precisely an imago for his total art.

Qiu's concept of total art recalls similar practices in the Euro-American worlds, such as Joseph Beuys's "social sculpture" in Germany , or Suzanne Lacy's "new genre public art" in the United States . Whereas both "social sculpture" and "new genre public art" have intense interests in contemporary socio-political issues, Qiu's total art is deeply invested in the ongoing Chinese history itself. Both "social sculpture" and "new genre public art" exercise an activist ethos, employing art to mobilize communities of engaged citizens. In variation, Qiu's spectatorial and participatory communities include not only his coevals, but also--even more importantly--his predecessors.

To me, Qiu's conception of total art has a strong basis in his command of the classical Chinese literature and especially in his training as a calligrapher. Both backgrounds place him in the genealogy of the traditional Chinese literati, whose praxis was shaped by the oft-cited dictum: " Yi tian xia wen ji ren " (taking the world--or all under heaven--as one's personal responsibilities). This dictum may serve as a manifesto for Qiu's total art.

Like his forebear writer-scholars, Qiu sees no division between divergent disciplines. The totality of knowledge is his library, preferably one run by a Renaissance man. Like other calligraphers, Qiu locates his own creativity in the kind of plenitude that comes from restrictions. A calligrapher trains by handling a relatively unchanged set of tools--a brush pen, an ink stick, an ink stone, and an absorbent role of paper--and by imitating master hands. Only through years of painstaking imitation can a calligrapher mature in his/her craft. Such training, I believe, cultivates in a calligrapher two epistemic tendencies: (1) to search for a consistent methodology rather than for a particular style; (2) to access the worldly phenomena as calligraphic scripts, ready to be inscribed. Qiu's total art manifests both tendencies. As Qiu himself suggests, he sees all schools of Chinese art as "mutations from calligraphy" (Qiu Blog 21 July 2008). Qiu's total art is, in this sense, a contemporary version of Chinese art.

Act III, Scene i: The Archive in the Clinic

As a total art project, The Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi , is structured to support Qiu's virtuosic outputs and cross-disciplinary aspirations. Among its four parts, both the "Archive" and the "Clinic" have clear focuses: the former deals with the political significance of the Nanjing Bridge in China 's revolutionary history; the latter the aftermath that continues to this date. In contrast, the other two parts--the "Think Tank" and the "Crystalloid"--are much more ambivalent, dense with allusions and multivalent in their implications. Given that the show's title highlights Zhuang Zi, the Daoist master, it would not, perhaps, be too clichd or gratuitous for me to sense in such a contrast a dynamic interplay between yang (positivity) and yin (negativity)--although, I admit, what's opaque/ yin to me might be quite lucid/ yang for others.

In "Archive," we encounter a stupendous collection of historical documents and objects excavated from the past four decades, ever since the Nanjing Bridge 's opening in 1968. These miscellaneous items--all imprinted with information, insignias, icons, or stylized renditions of the Nanjing Bridge --attest to the power and prevalence of the propaganda machine in Mao's China . As Qiu states, "The Nanjing Yangzi River Bridge occupies an important emblematic position in China 's visual culture. Its image is endowed with a triple symbolism, joining nationalism with revolution and modernity. It's practically a second Tiananmen" (Qiu Blog, 20 July 2008).

Qiu's statement finds incontrovertible material evidence in a 30 December 1968 edition of the People's Daily Newspaper , whose front page carries three celebrated messages: The title portion features Chairman Mao's calligraphy for Ren Min Ri Bao ( People's Daily Newspaper ) and a column containing a paragraph from the Chinese communist Bible, Quotations from the Chairman Mao Zedong ; the top half cheers for the opening of the Nanjing Yangze River Bridge as a miraculous triumph of the Mao-led proletarian revolution; and the bottom half gloats over the country's successful testing of the hydrogen bomb as a victory of Mao's thought. Incisively, Qiu selected the image of this newspaper page for his exhibition poster. His "Archive" also displays multiple clones of the 1968 People's Daily , cheering together with other fragments, detritus, and memorabilia from the same era. Exhumed from their anonymity as ephemeras, they now acquire momentary habitation in neatly ordered frames, like a community of glass coffins hanging on the walls.

"Rice Must Be Eaten; Tears Must Be Shed." This couplet, written in simplified Chinese characters and inscribed in black coal on the white wall, anchors the display in the "Clinic." These "Big-Character" wall lettering cites from an activist named Li Si, who has, since 2003, volunteered himself during every weekend to patrol the Nanjing Bridge in order to prevent suicide incidents. In collaboration with Li, Qiu converted this area into an abstract semblance of the halfway house that Li founded and named, "The Soul's Station," where Li transports, consoles and accommodates those whom he saved from suicides. Four single beds with worn-out mattresses, transferred straight from "The Soul's Station," occupy the central floor. Qiu humorously annotates the nature of these convalescence beds by installing alarm clocks to their feet. A mass of alarm clocks also populates the out-modish couch pushed against the wall, just under a looping video documentary of Qiu's conversations with the attempted-suiciders.

During my visit, the alarm clocks merely glare at me in their jeering muteness. Qiu's original plan was to make these fully functional alarm clocks ring every five minutes apart from each other. Had the plan been realized, we would have experienced a cartoonish impression of the living world: every five minutes, a thought occurs; a car is crashed; a species becomes extinct; a banana gets eaten; a baby is born; a vow is given; a lover is betrayed; a melody is remembered; a tycoon dies. "How many reasons for committing suicide?" The sound installation would seem to ask. Being a satirical quip, it would have offered an animated antithesis to Li Si's straightforward but charitable maxim: "Rice must be eaten; tears must be shed." The artist's plan, however, proves too high-maintenance to the museum staff, which unilaterally decided not to wind up the alarming cacophony. In contrast, the side wall features the blown-up photograph of another team, with Li Si franked by his tireless volunteer staff, standing in front of the door to "The Soul's Station" and composing themselves--all smiles--for Qiu's signature spectral group shot.

Although Qiu articulates his design for The Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi along four conceptual vectors, he also stresses their interdependence by mixing up their territories. Within "Archive," for instance, he placed an inventive implement whose features seemingly refer to both the "Clinic" and "Crystalloid": an oblong iron cast table (4 meters long x 60 centimeters wide x 90 centimeters high) adapted into an ink-producing machine. At each end of the tabletop stand a pair of small iron columns, attached with self-revolving anchors that clamp up four custom-made ink sticks (2 x 6.5 x 25 cm each). Tiny red flags flap on top of these ink sticks. Next to the four edges of the table are symmetrically placed clinical metal stands, those often used in intravenous therapy. Each stand carries a medicinal bag of clean water, which drips through a catheter to supply lubricants to the revolving ink stick, allowing liquid ink to be made. The liquid inks then flow through four channels carved onto the table surface, converging at a central hole, and leaking through a funnel to a catheter, which passes through an orifice on the floor. This infusion pipe will guide the dripping ink into a fiberglass vessel, one shaped like a calabash gourd and placed downstairs in the hall for "Crystalloid." In a masterful stroke of triple-entendre, Qiu positioned this juice-yielding inkstone table in between two large wall-mounted photographs of the North and South entrance gates to the Nanjing Bridge . Thus emerges from the table's elongated profile--enhanced by its diligent inky power engines and capped by the frontal views of the two entrances, red flags and all--the Nanjing Bridge in a gestalt. We see, then, a centerpiece in Qiu's "Archive."

Act I, Scene ii: Recycling Visuality--Echoes

As a site-specific installation, the ink-producing table exemplifies total art's propensity toward synthesis: a prop that squarely belongs to the "Archive" also complements other spheres. As an independent sculpture, however, this studious table recalls the crow metamorphosis rituals I described earlier. Qiu names this artwork poetically, "The Transmigration of the Smoke," which evokes the cyclical process of material transformation. "The coal becomes the smoke; the smoke becomes the ink stick; the ink stick becomes the liquid ink; the liquid ink can produce writing; the writing becomes inky traces; the inky traces becomes the crow; the crow becomes the coal," thus spake the total artist (Qiu, 12 July 2008).

Let's translate Qiu's poetry into a performative prose: If we understand the being of the ink stick as a solid mass of mineral and chemical substances, then a way for it to travel in the world is by becoming liquid. Once liquid, the ink may join with a brush pen to facilitate calligraphy, hence acquiring a thousand faces while becoming gradually dissipated. Like human faces, the faces of these calligraphies will eventually become ashes, which will join the earth to become its dark offspring, the coal. The crow is then the miracle in this cycle, ascending from the ashes and soaring up to draw an arc, before it disappears into a coal. The smoke, the ink stick, the calligraphy, the crow, and the coal are therefore different stages of a cyclical continuum.

But what about the hands that mold the crow and the feet that smash it?

Qiu remarked in our email exchange that there are "two engines" in The Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi : "one is the ink-producing machine; the other the two workers engaged in remolding the crows" (Qiu, 28 July 2008). We may consider an engine--as the force that propels movement --either extrinsic or intrinsic to the cycle of changes. A force with intention, the worker is the one who shapes the crows, retrieves their ashes, and re-shapes the crows. The worker is then a stand-in for the creator, a being supposedly extrinsic to the creation: We may call it "an artist" or "a god." Yet, as a force without intention, one that merely follows the rule of mechanical propulsion, the self-turning ink-producing machine appears neither intrinsic nor extrinsic to the ink stick. In fact, the ink stick cannot be detached from the process of its own transformation. Perhaps we may call the mechanism that both enables and is part of the ink stick's transformation "time." Here we see metaphysics intertwined with physics: the symbolism remains loose enough for viewers to imagine their own narratives.

A vision gets recycled from here to there to there and back again. We follow the trails of visuality through the air, the water, the metal, the plastic, the wood, and the coal-laden mud, but the answers to what transmutes such a vision and even to what makes us desire to see are buried in the cave, hidden inside the heart of a crow.

Act III, Scene ii: A Crow in the Coal and a Coal in the Crow

Much like an ink stick, a crow is a being in time. In ancient Chinese folk beliefs, the crow was deemed an auspicious sign, foretelling impending fortune and glory (Baidu online). When the crow's symbolism acquired some sinister aspects after the Tang Dynasty (618-907AD), the extensive and continuous Confucian literature still revered the bird as a filial animal that would care for its aging parents. Considering that the Confucian tradition has made an aggressive comeback in the post-Mao China , we may reasonably regard the crow as an idealized figure for a Chinese. This indigenous dimension seems present, yet constrained, in The Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi .

The sense of ambiguity is well captured by an installation in "Crystalloid," where we see bodies of taxidermic crows scattered on the ground, lying underneath five coal-inscribed Chinese characters on the wall: " Zhi Yao You Le Ren " (when there is a person), an excerpt from the remarks by Mao Zedong cited on the 30 December 1968 edition of People's Daily --even the font selected for the wall-lettering imitates the original newspaper's printed font. Qiu appears to use a neither-nor tactic here: by imitating his source, he neither forsakes, nor repeats, the original context for his own installation. While the crows clearly serve as surrogates for " ren " (a person or people) in Qiu's present arrangement, who this person is remains unconfirmed. By isolating the phrase from its original passage, in which Mao praises the value of people and the inspiring guidance of the Communist Party, Qiu tones down the phrase's nationalistic/revolutionary relevance, while modulating the excerpt to be a state-less, existential contemplation. Qiu's subtext therefore transfers the phrase--when there is a person--from its specific Chinese political framework to the generic human plateau.

The juxtaposition between the crow and the coal provides a constant visual motif in both "Think Tank" and "Crystalloid." The doubling between the coal and the crow in the installation piece we just discussed offers a spatial haiku for the cycle of life and death. Intriguingly, the coal , as the substance visualizing the phrase "when there is a person," is associated with birth (wherein a person appears!), while the taxidermic crows connote death . This life/the coal and death/the crow doubling is reversed when we enter another part of "Crystalloid," where the crow metamorphosis ritual takes place. In this living diorama inside an archaeological mine, the crows are literally made of coals. The crows and the coals--albeit in different shapes--are interchangeable as materials. Nonetheless, the cyclical actions performed by the two workers align the crows with birth and the coals -in their ashen form-with death . If we take the crow as a mythic equivalent of " ren " (a human being), then the coal's presence foreshadows this human being's future as fossils.

I suggest, however, that the point of discerning such a reversal in the hermeneutic positions of the crow and the coal is not to notice the artist's clever variations, but to understand that the creature and the mineral, or rather, the process of birthing and of dying, are mutually implicated--intertwined, even concurrent, for all earthly beings. Perhaps the artist is reinforcing precisely such an understanding as he places an abundant amount of taxidermic crows on top of, next to, below, and in between the coal-coated railings of a bridge leading from "Archive" to "Think Tank."

Act III, Scene iii: A Bridge for Lingering but Not for Leaning

The major structure that configures "Think Tank" spatially is a bridge stretching from the corridor into the main body of Exhibition Hall D. Calling this installation a bridge is a paradox. Its structure is modeled after a " Jiu qu qiao " (literally, a nine twisted bridge), which is a classical southern Chinese garden landscaping item featuring nine twists and turns in the bridge's composition (Baidu online). Yet the bridge in "Think Tank" doesn't cross any water; rather, it creates a tortuous path that impedes one's speedy passage. Not to call this installation a bridge, nevertheless, would seem to be an oversight. Wall-to-wall photographs of the Yangzi River flank the corridor where Qiu's own bridge first appears, implying the illusion that we are passing flowing water. Qiu's bridge also includes verisimilar artifacts from the Nanjing Bridge : a series of decorative carvings created during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Qiu and his team of students have painstakingly taken down rubbings from these carvings on the actual Bridge in order to reproduce the panels in coal plates here. Such arrangements suggest that Qiu has designed this installation as a displaced echo of the Nanjing Bridge .

The echo is displaced likely because Qiu intends for his bridge to be an alternative to those mechanisms that have constructed the Nanjing Bridge in the Chinese imaginary. Through its pensive twists and turns, Qiu's bridge distances itself from those reasons why people would be drawn to the Nanjing Bridge for committing suicides. The keys to how Qiu speculates on some of these reasons are buried in "Think Tank," but we can pretty much grasp his personal attitude regarding the matter at hand. The artist's alternative bridge serves to voice unflinchingly his reservations about impulsive suicides.

Our first clue comes from the name given to this bridge that transitions between "Archive" and "Think Tank": " Mo ping lan " (Not-to-lean-on-rails). This lyrical name is an excerpt from a verse by Li Yu (937-978), a prince and poet from the historical period known as Five Dynasties and Ten Countries. Li's poem observes the nature of life as dreams and urges one not to lean on the bridge's rails, brooding in solitary sorrows. "It's easier to part [from] than to see [here] again," muses Li. Qiu's rails, heavily coated with pungent-smelling coals and safe-guarded, as it were, by the myriad mythic crows, practically cannot be leaned on.

Further, Qiu reveals his opposition by showing--in a monitor inlaid into the corridor wall --the video document of a live performance he staged on the Nanjing Bridge . In January 2008, Qiu found a suicide note written in blood on the Bridge's railing, which read, "When love disappeared like smoke, the only thing left is to forget love." On 14 June 2008, Qiu went to the same spot, erased the original writing, cut open his own index finger, and inscribed a different graffiti in his own blood: "Where is the capital to Madagascar?" "Why Madagascar?" I asked the calligrapher. And Qiu replied, "Because nobody here knows where it is."

Madagascar is, then, a riddle. During the split second when one decides to throw oneself off the bridge, would this riddle disrupt one's frantic determination, hence permitting one to linger on a moment longer?

Act III, Scene 4: An Index in a Map

Like the nine-twisted bridge that frames its entrance, the "Think Tank" is also a paradox. This hall holds a remarkable selection of sketches, engravings, and etchings in original prints and mixed media on paper. What unify these diverse outputs are the themes, which revolve around the political significance of the city Nanjing and its eponymous bridge in China's dynastic and revolutionary histories. As Qiu informs, these artworks are derived from his initial drawings in which he planned out performances and installations for his larger Suicidology project. Put otherwise, the artworks displayed here function both as Qiu's foundation and road maps: As foundation, they were visualized in the past; as road maps, they are provisions for the future. In fact, most of the performance and installation plans charted out on paper here are yet to be realized as three-dimensional artworks. Thus, for the total artist, this "Think Tank" performs a double role: it is both an index for his ongoing Suicidology series and an integral part of The Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi .

Ironically, Qiu's "Think Tank" is also an anti-think tank. Unlike a common think tank, in which a group of experts is dedicated to problem-solving, Qiu's "Think Tank" presents rather than solves problems . In their convoluted fashions, Qiu's plans for his Suicidology series appear to oppose precisely the kind of political, economic, and military interests that a government- or corporate-sponsored think tank upholds. Exploring the potential causes of why the Nanjing Bridge has become a suicide magnet for ordinary Chinese, Qiu exposes the historical pathos of the city Nanjing and the revolutionary mythologizing of the Nanjing Bridge. The political and ideological ramifications that have woven around these two Nanjing identities amount to a source of collective pathology, for which the countless suicides are festering symptoms.

Emblematic of Qiu's contemplation of these issues is a sculpture that appears at the front entrance to Zendai . This frontispiece is a magnified version of those conventional merit certificates imprinted with the image of the Nanjing Bridge--many of those we've seen in "Archive." Yet, this blown-up certificate is made of one centimeter-thick of rusted iron and its decorative patterns--including the image of the Nanjing Bridge--are carved into the square and then folded forward, protruding from the surface. Moreover, Qiu sharpened these protrusions to make their edges like knifes. A record for an individual's glory and social confirmation is therefore exposed as a weapon, one that drives a person breathlessly forward and threatens with malice when s/he falls behind. If the recipient of such a merit certificate has to labor under the weight of success, then what about those who fail to attain merit certificates? Should they commit suicide? Or should they rest under the shadow cast by this rusty iron square?

No salvation is offered in The Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi . In "Think Tank," however, Qiu has envisioned certain proposals, not as salvations for those who wish to transcend the cycles of crows and coals, but as a tranquillizer--a momentary calming agent--for those who ever contemplate suicides.

Act III, Scene iv: Suicidology 101

We see one of these proposals drawn up in "Think Tank" materialized in the exhibition's title piece: a giant calabash gourd made of fiberglass, with a steel cap that shapes like a hypodermic needle. A number of black butterflies are fluttering, pausing, or lying still in this giant calabash, which is housed in "Crystalloid." A smaller fiberglass calabash sits a few feet away, serving as the container for the liquid ink dripping from the ink-producing machine upstairs. Museum assistants are instructed to replace any full container with an empty one and to seal the ink-filled calabash with a hypodermic needle cap.

By joining hypodermic needles with calabashes, Qiu creates a visual conceit to address the two conceptual elements in his title: the ataraxic and Zhuang Zi. The fiberglass calabashes, equipped with needles, become syringes, which, when needed, may be filled with the ataraxic to tranquilize those who lean too tremulously close to the edge of a bridge or a window ledge. Suicidology 101 prescribed by the total artist: persuasion through art as medicine.

But, how does Qiu's medicine relate to Zhuang Zi ?

Most immediately, the giant calabash with butterflies in it combines two familiar allusions to the works of the Daoist poet-philosopher Zhuang Zhou (369-286 BC). When his frequent interlocutor Hui Shi complained to Zhuang about a giant calabash gourd, which can be used neither as a bottle, nor as a scoop, Zhuang replies, "Why don't you tie up the giant calabash around your waist as a buoy to float over streams and lakes?" (Zhuangzi, 10-12, my loose translation). The freedom with which Zhuang eludes any fixity of mind, as we've seen in his parable of the giant calabash, evolves into a certain epistemic elasticity in his dream about a butterfly. Waking up from a dream where he roamed freely as a butterfly, Zhuang asked, "Has Zhou dreamed about the butterfly, or has the butterfly dreamed about Zhou?" An imaginative transposition of perspectives allows Zhuang to sidestep the division between self and other by forgetting that there is a self. No bridge is needed between the man and the butterfly; the man is already the butterfly. Thus, try and we can all fly .

For Qiu's project, however, the "Zhuang Zi" in its title is not just an honorific name for Zhuang Zhou, nor does it merely refer to the Daoist master's thinking collected in the volumes entitled Zhuangzi . Rather, the signifier calls attention to a long-standing, yet somewhat submerged, spiritual heritage in China. According to Qiu, Zhuang Zi symbolizes "a whole system of cultural outlooks and modes of living," one that has inspired such brilliant calligraphic and literary works as "Preface to the Orchid Pavilion" [by Wang Xizhi (303-361)] and "The Red Cliffs Poetry" [by Su Shi (1037-1101)]. Such a system, as Qiu adds, cultivates "an anti-utilitarian aesthetic attitude and an ability to transcend the preoccupations of the moment" (Qiu Blog). It allows one "to understand the world holistically in a free and open vision." Perhaps, with such a vision, as Qiu's remark implies, a person would be able to circumvent the blind fixation that contributes to impulsive suicide.

Act VI: Calligraphic Archaeology

Zhuang Zhou did not tell us what color the butterfly in his dream was. The butterflies in Qiu's giant fiberglass calabash, however, are black, like the crow and the coal. Black is the color of existence, of being and becoming, in The Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi. The ink that gradually fills up the smaller calabash-syringe is also black: black is the color of Qiu's medicine.

It is revealing that Qiu would cite "Preface to the Orchid Pavilion" and "The Red Cliffs Poetry" as milestones in the cultural lineage of Zhuang Zi. Qiu first became widely known as a xingwei (performance) artist by copying Wang Xizhi's cursive writing for the "Preface to the Orchid Pavilion" on the same sheet of paper a thousand times. Decades later in his present total art project, Qiu adopted the title from Su Shi's calligraphic masterpiece, "The Red Cliffs Poetry," to name his own archaeological cave inside "Crystalloid." Here Su's " red " becomes Qiu's " black ." In The Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi , the only displayed record in which Qiu actively engaged in calligraphy is his blood writing on the rail of the Nanjing Bridge: "Where is the capital of Madagascar?" In "Madagascar," I heard a rumor from a crow: red equals black , as blood equals ink . The black ink is, then, the living blood of a calligrapher's art.

A calligrapher is an archaeologist in a triple sense: to dig into the past; to reconstruct the past through present-tensed actions; to discover history by composing history. Qiu digs into the past through his calligraphic practice, which includes routinely imitating his predecessors' writings, and through his prodigious compilation of material traces from the past. By immersing himself "totally" in what he managed to unearth, as seen in his "Archive" in Zendai , Qiu reconstructs the historical mythos of the Nanjing Yangze River Bridge and exposes the Bridge's continuous influence on the Chinese populace. He has rediscovered a site--one so familiar to the Chinese as to be naturalized--and deemed it worthy of archaeological investigation, which aims to uncover its layers of fabrication. Yet, Qiu's purpose is not only to call forth history for history's sake, but also to bring his temporal intervention into play. Through his total art, he partially determines how composing the history of the Nanjing Bridge can henceforth be changed.

As totality encompasses opposites, the act of writing already plants the seed of its own erasure. We perform the act of seeing by simultaneously including and excluding what's unseen. To me, the deepest mystery in what Qiu evokes as "a free and open vision" lies in a momentary de-visualization of the present moment, when the one who sees plunges into the creative stream of time and suddenly remembers that change is always the name of the game.