Close
About
FAQ
Home
Collections
Login
USC Login
Register
0
Selected
Invert selection
Deselect all
Deselect all
Click here to refresh results
Click here to refresh results
USC
/
Digital Library
/
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
/
Totality: theory, practice, and pedagogy in Qiu Zhijie’s “Total Art”
(USC Thesis Other)
Totality: theory, practice, and pedagogy in Qiu Zhijie’s “Total Art”
PDF
Download
Share
Open document
Flip pages
Contact Us
Contact Us
Copy asset link
Request this asset
Transcript (if available)
Content
Totality:
Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy in Qiu Zhijie’s “Total Art”
By
Wenzhuo Wu
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF CURATORIAL STUDIES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
May 2019
Copyright 2019 Wenzhuo Wu
2
Table of Contents
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. 3
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 4
Inspiration and History: Map of Total Art .................................................................................... 10
A Socio-political Archaeologist: Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge Project .................................... 18
A Cultural Mediator ...................................................................................................................... 31
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 49
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 54
3
List of Figures
1. Writing the “Orchid Pavilion Preface” One Thousand Times Courtesy of the artist……...5
2. Map of Total Art…………………………………………………………………………………..11
3. Poster of Nanjing Yangtze River during Cultural Revolution……………………………….19
4. Archive……………………………………………………………………………………………..21
5. The Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi………………………………………………………………..23
6. Where is the Capital of Madagascar?................................................................................25
7. How to Become a Loser…………………………………………………………………………..28
8. Colorful Lantern at Shangyuan Festival………………………………………………………..33
9. The First Encounter of the Colorful Lantern Scroll…………………………………………..35
10. Jinling Theater Portraits…………………………………………………………………………36
11. Writing 10 Tang Poems Backwards……………………………………………………………..41
12. Monument: Headlines from Newspapers in a Past Time……………………………………..43
13. The Power of Babel………………………………………………………………………………..45
14. All the People I Thought of On September 16, 2002………………………………………….47
4
Introduction
From 1990 to 1995, the artist Qiu Zhijie ( 邱志杰) re-wrote the script of the “Lantingxu”
(Preface to the Orchid Pavilion), one of the canonical masterpieces of traditional Chinese
calligraphy by Wang Xizhi, on a single piece of Xuan paper one thousand times.
1
At first, the
Chinese characters were clear, with semantic and aesthetic meanings as usual. As Qiu continued
to write, multiple layers of copy became more difficult to read, words became ink clusters,
eroding characters, and leaving behind an abstract painting. After fifty repetitions, the
calligraphy became an opaque dark paper with no ink traces left and it turned into “Zen
calligraphy,” a practice providing access to the spiritual realm where Qiu could worship,
mediate, and be enlightened.
2
Qiu’s Writing the “Orchid Pavilion Preface” One Thousand
Times (Figure 1.) constructs a dialogue between the artist and the original calligrapher,
demolishing the received cultural scheme constructed by calligraphy, through a reiterative and
durational performance. According to critic Liu Tian, the loss of history entailed by the
1
Lantingxu is a famous work of calligraphy by Wang Xizhi (301-363CE). Written in elegant
semi-cursive script and underpinned by deep philosophical thinking, it is among the best known
and often copied pieces of calligraphy in Chinese history and also a famous piece of Chinese
literature. It is revered as the best running calligraphy. Wang is respected as Shu Sheng, “Sage of
Calligraphy” or “Super Master of Calligraphy”. Xuan paper, or Shuen paper, or rice paper is a
specific kind of paper used for painting and writing originated in ancient China.
2
Zen calligraphy is originated among Buddhist monks in Japan with the flourishing of Zen
Buddhism in the Kamakura period (1185-1333 CE). But this practice is not the prerogative of
well-trained Zen monks, some other practitioners incorporate the Zen philosophical approach of
simplifying and removing unnecessary elements to pursue spiritual enrichment through the
practice of calligraphy. See Shozo Sato, Shudo: The Quiet Art of Japanese Zen Calligraphy
(Tuttle Publishing: North Clarendon, 2013),12.
5
obliteration of a revered text is in an attempt to perpetuate its memory.
3
This was the first piece
created by Qiu that was widely discussed in the international press. Since then, his work has
focused on the relationship between heritage and modernity, tying together history and the
contemporary reality of post-1989 era China.
Figure 1. Qiu Zhijie, Writing the “Orchid Pavilion Preface” One Thousand Times, 1990-1995,
ink painting and video. Courtesy of the artist.
Born in 1969, Qiu Zhijie grew up in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. As a child Qiu
learned ta bei (rubbings from stone inscriptions) and followed the traditional method of
3
Liu Tian, “Map Beyond Boundaries: Qiu Zhijie and Mapping the World Project,” in Bentu:
Chinese Artists in A Time of Turbulence and Transformation, eds. Suzanne Pagé, Laurence
Bossé, Philip Tinari, and Claire Staebler (Paris: Hazan, 2016), 117.
6
practicing Chinese calligraphy — imitating ancient masterpieces from calligraphy copybooks,
which is fairly standard in Chinese education until now. His practices’ correlation to Chinese
cultural heritage thus can be attributed to his personal educational background. In 1992, he
graduated from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art), a school that
cultivated many iconic figures in the first wave of avant-garde Chinese artists in the late 1980s
and early 1990s: Huang Yong Ping, Zhang Peili, Gu Wenda, Wu Shanzhuan, and others.
Although inspired by his predecessors, Qiu is different from them in many aspects. These
generational differences are important because distinct social and political environments shape
various approaches to traditional Chinese culture and Western culture. The first generation of
Chinese contemporary artists was largely influenced by the suppression of the Cultural
Revolution and the influx of Western contemporary art and pop culture after 1979. Scholar of
Chinese contemporary art Gao Minglu indicates that almost all of the artists within this first
generation of conceptual artists tended to break up any doctrine, dogma, or authority.
4
They
addressed tradition by challenging Confucianism as a radical resistance to religious and civic
authority. In contrast, Qiu was a boy when the revolution reached a climax in the 1970s, which
means that he was not involved in the radical movement and encountered it in a passive way.
The artist has stated that it is his hybrid background of old literati, folk culture, socialist
4
Gao Minglu, “From Elite to Small Man: The Many Faces of a transnational Avant-Garde in
Mainland China” in Inside Out: New Chinese Art, ed. Gao Minglu (San Francisco: San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, 1998), 159.
7
memories, and globalization that influences him.
5
Qiu therefore deals with history and memories
in a seemingly neutral or objective way. During the 1990s, contemporary Chinese artists were
perceived as a group of cynical intellectuals who lost faith in the party-state’s ideology and
explored alternative spaces for resistance by western audiences. But Qiu rejected the
stereotypical ways in which contemporary Chinese artists were understood in this period within
transnational contexts, being either characterized into Cultural Pop or aligned with the group of
artists who travelled abroad and dealt with in-between experiences.
6
Instead, Qiu absorbed
numerous schools of Western philosophy, melding them with traditional Chinese philosophy.
This creates a transnational foundation for his later works.
Qiu’s artistic interests are dynamic, from his earliest projects in the early 1990s to the
present, in both the making of his work and the issues it tackles. This paper mainly focuses on
his concept of “total art,” theorized and developed since 2003. I argue total art proposes a
transcultural philosophical language that disrupts binary discussions surrounding the discourse of
contemporary Chinese art after the end the Cultural Revolution. This language mediates the past
and present, the self and other, through which Qiu suggests a critical attitude towards history and
trauma. Qiu defines “total art” as an artistic practice based on cultural research, which turns to
sociocultural events as catalysts for art-making with the intent to reconfigure culture and thereby
5
Qiu Zhijie, “Why do I Practice Chinese Calligraphy?” in UnicornArt WeChat Subscription,
December 5, 2014, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/3aC1yemgVPzCW2zh5E2lMA.
6
Some artists who travelled abroad during 1990s, such as Cai Guo Qiang, Huang Yong Ping,
and Zhang Huan, reveled in the “transexperience” of living in between multiple temporalities,
cultures, and worldviews.
8
providing innovative perspectives for participants.
7
Over the course of fifteen years, he has
focused on massive projects that encompass such diverse practices as cultural investigation,
historical documentation, sociological investigation, the creation of multimedia artworks, and
installations at international exhibitions. Qiu’s “total art” theory provides an efficacious example
of political Chinese contemporary art praxis in the context of Chinese contemporary art after the
millennium. This thesis aims to examine the artistic, sociopolitical, and pedagogical values of
“total art” and to articulate how Qiu’s practice visualizes the past, gestures towards the present,
and shapes the future.
To examine the totality in Qiu’s art practice, I propose approaching it through three
angles. First, I recapture the socio-political landscape of his large projects, initiated from a
specific site or work, which then typically involve historical and cultural research around certain
events. This process ultimately culminates in large-scale and intricate installations. Second, by
examining his refabrication of an ancient painting Colorful Lantern at Shangyuan Festival (c.
1573-1627), interweaving inscriptions, and appropriating Foucauldian genealogy / archeology of
knowledge to analyze modernity through the lens of history, I discuss how the artist initiates a
discursive analysis of history.
8
Lastly, I will bring up Qiu’s pedagogical practices around total
art in the conclusion and scrutinize the efficacy of developing total art as a pedagogical method.
7
Qiu Zhijie, On Total Art (Shanghai: Shanghai Jinxiu Wenzhang Press, 2012), 73.
8
Michel Foucault, The archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972).
9
This study centers Qiu’s Nanjing Yangzi River Bridge Project (2006-2014), the first
major artwork after he initiated a research program Total Theatre in 2003, and closely looks into
specific artworks made for the three exhibitions of this project: The Ataraxic of Zhuangzi (2008),
The Bridge· Nanjing· Under the Heaven (2008) and Breaking Through the Ice (2009). Qiu
initiated this ambitious series in response to the status of Nanjing Yang River Bridge as China’s
most popular suicide location. By taking a holistic approach to his investigation, Qiu’s Nanjing
Yangzi River Bridge Project interweaves the historical deployments of cultural concepts such as
revolution, democracy, modernization, and personal destiny. He believes that his art is not just
commentary, but that it has the capacity to shape society and human activities.
As a social activist and a cultural mediator, Qiu initiated Qiu’s Notes on the Colorful
Lantern Scroll Project (2009- 2018), the second project I will elaborate in this thesis. By making
an enlarged copy of The Colorful Lantern Scroll, a Ming Dynasty genre painting, and adding
detailed annotations, paintings, sculptures, live performances and other media, Qiu enmeshes
history with contemporary concerns. As a professor at the School of Experimental Art, Central
Academy of Fine Arts, Qiu elaborates “total art” as a pedagogical method with his students in a
studio with the same title, declaring as much in his manifesto published in his book On Total Art.
By examining the various artwork and practices from Qiu’s oeuvre comprising theory, art
practice, and pedagogy, this thesis seeks to discuss Qiu’s work within the terminology he
proposes. The works I choose here have, of course, been explored within broader surveys of
Chinese contemporary art from 1990s to the present, or more narrow studies about topics such as
10
Total Art Studio, but have not been situated within an overall narrative tracing a genealogy of the
theory and practices of “total art”. Birgit Hopfener is one of the art historians to discuss Qiu’s
practice, and she examines “how he positions himself in the context of contemporary Chinese art
history writing as well as in relation to discourses of global contemporaneity.”
9
Hopfener
situates Qiu’s practice in a transcultural context to emphasize interrelationality and a critical
situatedness. In a case study on the exhibition entitled The Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi (2008), the first
installment of Nanjing Yangzi River Bridge Project, Meiling Cheng, on the other hand, proposes
a perspective of de-visualizing calligraphic archaeology to examine Qiu’s “total art.”
10
Inspired
by their achievements in many aspects, my discussion will start with the historical origins and
philosophical inspirations of Qiu’s “total art” and then dig into case studies on his projects while
teasing out how he works with various media.
Inspiration and History: Map of Total Art
The idea of “total art” is not a novel creation, nor does it originate from Qiu Zhijie. In
forming his concept of “total art”, Qiu borrows variously from traditional Chinese philosophy,
western aesthetics, and art movements and theories. His practice, on the one hand, pay homage
to masters who inspire him; incorporating fragments from various times and schools and
9
Birgit Hopfener, “Qiu Zhijie’s Self-Conception as an Artist – Doing Art in a Critical
Historical and Transcultural Perspective,” Journal of Art Historiography 10 (June 2014): 10.
10
Meiling Cheng, “De/visualizing Calligraphic Archaeology: Qiu Zhijie's Total Art,” The
Drama Review 53, no. 2 (June 2009): 17–34.
11
developing the unique theory situated within contemporary China. These transnational
theoretical touchstones are a significant component of works of “total art.”
Figure 2. Qiu Zhijie, Map of Total Art, 2012, ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
Qiu’s representative work the Map of Total Art (2012) (Figure 2.) provides a perfect starting
point to detail Qiu’s theory of “total art.” It is an ink painting that pictures the theoretical origins,
frameworks, and his related practices of “total art” from 2003 to 2012 as well as paths and
convergence among them. In the center of the map, there is a circular “lake of real freedom
(Xiao Yao You)” and a “zigzag bridge of the spirit of play” stretched over the lake. According to
the central position of the ideology, “total art” is derived from a Taoist poet-philosopher Zhuang
Zhou (369-286BC), often known as Zhuangzi (Master Zhuang), especially his representative
writing “Xiao Yao You.”
11
This classic text incorporates one of the essential ideas of Zhuangzi:
that people should get rid of the bondage of the mundane world and strive after absolute spiritual
11
“Xiao Yao You” is translated to “Wandering in Absolute Freedom.” See Da Zhonghua
Wenku/Library of Chinese Classics 1999: 3.
12
freedom.
12
Qiu also highlights the spirit of play embedded in the philosophy of Zhuangzi, which
serves as an instructive strategy of self-emancipation for all his practice. I will elaborate on this
point later in the specific case study of the Nanjing Bridge project.
“Total art” is an art of connectivity and mediation, as Qiu describes in his book On Total
Art.
13
The idea of “connectivity” is underlined in his self-identification and the genre of “map.”
Qiu identifies himself as a “cartographer” instead of a calligrapher, an artist or a professor;
pointing to his inclination to draw maps visualizes his complicated knowledge and deliberations.
He develops a new genre of landscape painting by appropriating brush strokes and ink painting
techniques in traditional Shanshui, but breaks the usual emphasis on horizontality, favoring
instead verticality to envision interrelations within a subject from a bird’s-eye view.
14
Curator
Defne Ayas describes that his maps revel in detail, unfurling complex and anachronistic
universes in which global, political, and intellectual dynamics can be reconstituted, if not
contested; a site where mutable boundaries between world histories of intellectual thought, from
Confucianism to the Enlightenment, can be outlined.
15
12
Da Zhonghua Wenku/Library of Chinese Classics. Zhuangzi, published in Chinese and
English. English trans. Wang Rongpei, Modern Chinese trans. Qin Xuqing and Sun Yongchang.
(Hunan: Hunan People’s Publishing House, 1999), 65.
13
Qiu, On Total Art, 332.
14
Liu, “Map Beyond Boundaries,” 118.
15
Defne Ayas, “In a World that Makes Us Lost,” in Qiu Zhijie: Unicorns in a Blueprint, ed.
Defne Ayas (Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2016), 6.
13
The concept of “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) was coined and popularized by the
German composer Richard Wagner in relation to the operas he was writing.
16
Qiu relates his
“total art” to Wagner’s legacy by constructing a theater in exhibition spaces, which is inspired by
“total stage” featuring mobilizing multi-media and creating immersive experiences. However, I
argue that the theoretical foundation and guidance of “total art” shares considerable similarities
with the Gesamtkunstwerk. As Wagner stresses throughout the Zurich writings of 1849-57, the
Gesamtkunstwerk is not simply an artistic dream but a social one, and that social dream is
essentially a communitarian one.
17
The Gesamtkunstwerk, in Wagner’s thinking, had the
capacity to be a “mutual artwork of the future,” rather than a self-aggrandizing individual
effort.
18
The main percepts of Qiu’s “total art” concern the active role of the artist in society, a
position pursued through the understanding of social interaction and by dismantling prejudices
and stereotypes that tend to block a more creative relationship with oneself, objects, and
history.
19
Qiu’s term thus bears a similar ambition of social transformation and cooperation with
the Gesamtkunstwerk.
The concept of “total art” as a social as well as aesthetic proposal has resonance with
post-1989 China in both art world and the society. The ideology of a communitarian society and
16
Other possible translations of the word Gesamtkunstwerk includes “communal work of art,”
“collective work of art,” “combined work of art,” and “unified work of art.” See Matthew Wilson
Smith, The Total Work of Art: from Bayreuth to Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2007), 8-9.
17
Ibid, 9.
18
Ibid.
19
Andrea Bellini et al, ed. Qiu Zhijie: Journeys without Arrivals. (Milano: Mousse Publishing,
2017), 99.
14
the determination to shape the future corresponds with the reaffirmation of economic and social
reforms, the spread of globalization, and the rise of China with Communist Party statesman Deng
Xiaoping making his “Southern Tour” in the spring of 1992. Yet this concept of “mutualism”
does not purport to deny the creativity and values of individuality, but instead underlines the
community of human beings that each person contributes toward, analogous to the motivating
force of building a “community of common destiny” (mingyun gongtongti) promoted by the
current Chinese government under the leadership of Xi Jinping.
20
This phrase contains a
“common aspiration” for better future shared by the world, an interconnected relationship
between different countries, and an attitude of accepting and respecting differences and the
others.
“Total art” as a proper term, was induced and first formulated by Adrian Henri in 1974 in
his book Total Art: Environments, Happenings and Performance.
21
“Total art” shares
similarities with the Gesamtkunstwerk in terms of mobilizing various media and incorporating
them into an immersive art piece. Yet “total art” was diversified with the development of
contemporary art in the western art world in the 1960s and 1970s. Total Art documents and
amply illustrates “total art” as the notion of art as environment, and Henri gives concise
historical coverage to happenings, proposing “art as performer.” This book cites a number of
20
Xi defined Chinese diplomacy in terms of aspiring to a “community of common destiny” for
the first time in the speech at The Central Conference on the Diplomatic Work with Neighboring
Countries in 2013.
21
Adrian Henri. Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance. (New York: Praeger,
1974)
15
notorious manifestations and efforts initiated by artists from Happenings and Fluxus, including
Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow. Their work and practices are examples for Henri of total art.
However, Henri also includes works of installation art and pop art. He uses the notion of “total
art” to include all radical art practices in that time and confuses the history of total art and the
history of Modernism. While Henri is committed to defining his neologism, he does not shed
light on the various methodologies of total art and is instead trapped in the documentation of the
final products of artistic practices.
22
Even so, Qiu admits Henri’s point that practices of total art,
to a great extent, is an apt term to describe the blurry boundary between fine arts and daily life.
23
Since Qiu was a student in the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, he has written and spoken
of being influenced by Josef Beuys and the artists associated with the Fluxus movement. Beuys’
impact on Qiu’s thinking and artmaking practice can be felt in both Writing the “Orchid Pavilion
Preface” One Thousand Times and in Qiu’s theoretical references to “total art” appearing in his
Map of Total Art. His socially-engaged projects such as Nanjing Project recalls similar practices
in Western art world. Indeed, we might think of the Nanjing project as a form of Beuysian
“social sculpture,” one of the most influential theoretical hypotheses developed from Beuys’
statement that everything is art and that every human being is an artist.
24
Beuys worked
intensively with the social theory of Rudolf Steiner adopting the “threefold social organism” — a
22
Ibid.
23
Qiu Zhijie, “The Total Artistic Creation Based on Social Survey: Experimental Teaching in
Total Art Studio of China Academy of Art,” Northern Art (March 2007): 58.
24
David Adams, "Joseph Beuys: Pioneer of a Radical Ecology," Art Journal 51, no. 2 (Summer
1992): 28.
16
sociological theory suggesting the progressive independence of society’s economic, political, and
cultural institutions, as the archetypal “social sculpture.”
25
By no coincidence, Qiu regards
Steiner as one of important references for his total art. Based on the consensus that individual
human being should be the true source of power in productive social process, he alludes to the
utopian vision that he ultimately shares with Beuys, namely, their belief that art can be used to
help solve real social and cultural problems, and thereby transforming society.
26
“New genre public art” proposed by Suzanne Lacy manifests similar sociopolitical
agenda with social sculpture, but emphasizes concepts of audiences, relationship,
communication, and political intention at the expense of more traditional artistic criteria, such as
material/media, space, and form.
27
But there are noticeable differences between the terms “total
art,” and Beuys’s and Lacy’s artistic formulations. Social Sculpture and New Genre Public Art
are invested in contemporary sociopolitical issues, while Qiu’s total art traces current ills to past
pathologies, intentionally digging into historical case studies to arrive at contemporary
prescriptions. His mobilization of historical allusions, ancestors, and ideologies are based on his
belief in connectivity and foreground a broader sense of “total” in his practice.
25
Lukas Beckman, “The Causes Lie in the Future,” in Joseph Beuys, Mapping the Legacy, ed.
Gene Ray (New York: D.A.P., 2001), 103.
26
Joan Rothfuss, “Joseph Beuys: Echoes in America,” in Joseph Beuys, Mapping the Legacy,
ed. Gene Ray (New York: D.A.P., 2001), 43.
27
Suzanne Lacy, ed. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. (Seattle: Bay Press,
1995), 28.
17
Both social sculpture and new genre public art are staged by artists/activists who use art
to mobilize communities of engaged citizens in the here and now. Qiu’s fluid roles in making art
are in accord with Lacy’s discussion of the new roles for artists in new genre public art. Lacy
cites the work of Allan Kaprow, who was Lacy’s mentor, calling attention to the inherently
pedagogical nature of art.
28
She also refers to Judy Chicago and other feminist artists of the
1970s for developing a concept of art that stemmed from “an examination of issues of authority,
representation, historical revision, and the pedagogical effects of public discourses on political
systems.”
29
In this aspect, total art is similar to “new genre public art,” as Qiu interprets his roles
through various aspects and set different agendas for respective character. These roles will
function as threads of weaving the thesis to portray the trajectory of total art.
Qiu does not explicitly classify whether each of his works belongs within his concept of
total art. Although he employs a lot of social investigation and underlines the importance of
social engagement, I do not think that Qiu’s practice neatly parallels with social practice or
Lacy’s new genre public art. His work is a visual representation of the fertile nexus between
sociology and art. Furthermore, his social investigation is neither intended to result in direct
political action nor targeted social activism, which thus marks a notable difference between
“total art” and social practice art as formulated within the western context. This different
objective not only sets the seemingly neutral tone of all “total art” projects but also leads to
28
Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, 37-38.
29
Ibid.
18
distinct methodologies throughout the research process. As Cheng argues, Qiu’s spectatorial and
participatory communities include not only his contemporaries, but also his predecessors.
30
Qiu’s methodology of total art invests in the activity of conducting research on historical texts
and images and constructing dialogue with predecessors. This considerable attention on history
is rare in “new genre public art.” It is these differences that legitimize “total art” under the strict
art censorship in China and hint the artist’s personal political preferences and choices.
A Socio-political Archaeologist: Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge Project
A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge is a representative project to discuss
Qiu’s notion of “total art.” The project, which spans eight years, reexamines the history of the
Nanjing Bridge as a political monument and a national symbol of the People’s of Republic of
China in the 20th century, especially focusing on its recent history as a popular site for a large
number of suicides. It comprises intensive cultural and historical research on the bridge, both
textual and fieldwork, site-specific interventions on the bridge, and suicide prevention with a
non-governmental organization. The exhibition of this project featured a comprehensive range of
media including performance, drawing, photography, installation, calligraphy, printmaking,
video.
30
Cheng, “De/visualizing Calligraphic Archaeology,” 20.
19
Figure 3. Poster of Nanjing Yangtze River during Cultural Revolution.
The Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, completed and open for traffic in 1968, was the first
modern bridge designed and constructed by Chinese people without the help of foreign architects
after relations between China and Soviet Union soured. Alienated from the Soviet Union and the
United States, China was politically and economically struggling during the climax of the Cold
War in the 1960s. The Nanjing Bridge was thus seen optimistically, as a representation of
national independence and a growing self-confidence in the developing socialist republic. The
bridge was opened during tumultuous Cultural Revolution, therefore it also served as a major
piece of propaganda in advocating the “great victory of Mao Zedong Thought (Maoism).”
Posters featuring the bridge with banners and socialist painting styles were distributed
everywhere in China, including being reproduced in primary school textbooks, which helped to
create and inform the collective memories of a generation of Chinese people born during the
1960s and 1970s. (Figure 3.) Qiu argues that the Nanjing Bridge is equal to Tian’anmen Square
in its political and symbolic importance, as it reflects the nationalism, socialist ideologies, and
20
modernization efforts of the twentieth century.
31
Tian’anmen Square, as a symbolic imagery of
China, has been popularized by generations of Chinese artists whereas Nanjing Bridge is rarely
considered as a subject of artistic inquiry. The bridge is also an example of “gigantism” in the
process of industrialization and modernization.
32
The giant scale of these venues and
architectures was intended to accommodate masses of people, providing a common space for
individuals, otherwise known as a public space. The emergence of airports, stations, cinemas,
and the like relied on engineering and architectural developments as well as organized social
systems produced by the industrial revolution. Qiu argues that through large-scale construction
projects such as the Nanjing Bridge, China attempted to harness the imagination of the country,
visualizing the rapid development of the country. This spectacle will render this ideology
manipulated by the state to each individual and trigger their self-imagination.
33
The asymmetric
relationship between human beings and gigantic architecture implies complicated negotiations
between individuals and the state’s will throughout modernization and its political
transformations. I argue that in this project the artist criticizes the ideologies undergirding such
“gigantism” and questions if individuals resist this ideology that the state imposes on them, and
if so, that the discrepancy between the reality of China’s economic transformation and the
31
Qiu Zhijie, “Qiu Zhijie: Indulgence is the Source of His Happiness,” interviewed by Kuai
Lehao, Nan Fang Ren Wu Zhou Kan (Southern People Weekly), November 2, 2015,
http://www.jnnc.com/2015/1105/431194.shtml.
32
Ibid.
33
Qiu Zhijie, artist talking at UCCA: Gigantism and Plants’ Waiting, accessed February 1,
2019, http://cul.sohu.com/20090409/n263295853_3.shtml.
21
spectacle of large-scale building projects might, in fact, lead to the large amount of suicides
committed on the bridge. In this way, industrial “progress” is also the source of social ill.
According to the artist, the official record holds that over 2,000 people have committed
suicide on the Nanjing Bridge since its completion—a statistic even more startling than that of
the world’s putatively top suicide magnet, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge (around 1,200
people since 1937).
34
That a bridge ostensibly representing modernization and progress becomes
a popular suicide location gives voice to Qiu’s exploration of how the meanings of the Nanjing
Bridge is constituted and changed. This morbid statistic inspired Qiu to launch an extensive
long-term project so that he might understand the Bridge’s history and redress its current status
as a suicide magnet. This series of work connects the bridge to the past, taking a macroscopic
perspective on the official politics and socialist ideology that informed its construction, and
associates it to daily life, individual biographies, death and destiny, thereby suggesting a deep
relationship between art and life.
Figure 4. Qiu Zhijie, Archive, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.
34
Ibid.
22
In 2008, the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art organized a solo exhibition of Qiu
Zhijie based on this ongoing project. A series of archival materials relating to the bridge and
suicides attached to the wall or displayed in the glass cases gave viewers a sense of visiting a
historical museum or an exhibition hall; they recall the similar form of Fluxus boxes, a peculiar
expression of Fluxus artists, and recognize Qiu’s affinity with Fluxus movement and artists. This
series is entitled Archive (2008) (Figure 4.), and it is comprised of a collection of historical
documents and objects excavated from the past four decades since the opening of the Nanjing
Yangtze River Bridge in 1968, including questionnaires from volunteers, survivors, and victims’
families involved in suicides committed in the bridge. The project begins with gathering archival
“evidence” as though this is an unquestionable and incontrovertible ground for investigation. But
it is not merely a collection of historical objects but also a creative process that engages new
approaches of social investigation.
35
For instance, Qiu sent his students to engage with citizens
in Nanjing and to help with his “experimental investigation,” enabling an investigation team to
improvise on the spot to gain reactions.
36
These methods are essential components in Qiu’s
pedagogy of total art. The genre of the work discloses broader social considerations, more
diverse methodologies, and more systemic deliberations than Qiu’s earlier practices in Post-
35
Qiu Zhijie, Qiu Zhijie’s Note on Archives (2008). Accessed Feb 1, 2019,
http://www.qiuzhijie.com/worksleibie/zhuangzhi/e-danganguan.htm.
36
Qiu, “The Total Artistic Creation Based on Social Survey,” 60.
23
sense Sensibility exhibition, in which he paid attention to personal sensation and conceptual
realism.
37
Qiu’s solo exhibitions are always similar to rehearsals where interaction, imperfection,
and uncertainty are endemic to the creative process. His preference for curatorial experiments is
due to his opposition to the canonical exhibition system and appeal for “Art on Spot.”
38
He
elaborated different stages of his work around the Nanjing Bridge Project in five exhibitions
from 2008 to 2014, all of which are byproducts of his working process. Considering the
temporality of the original exhibitions and the difficulty to be contextualized in them, the
following argument will highlight specific artworks instead of project-oriented exhibitions.
Figure 5. Qiu Zhijie, The Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi, 2008, fiber glass, steel, and butterflies. Courtesy
of the artist.
37
Post-Sense Sensibility was an exhibition in 1999 curated by Qiu Zhijie and Wu Meichun. This
idea is a constant withdraw from identity and categorization, a constant curation and initiation of
de-familiarization of self and experience.
38
“Humanity: A Project that Should Be Completed by Art,” Qiu Zhijie interviewed by Liu
Jingjing in Qiu Zhijie: Journeys without Arrivals (Milano: Mousse Publishing, 2017), 28.
24
The Ataraxic of Zhuang Zi (2008) is the first in the series of Suicidology exhibitions. As
the word “ataraxic,” indicates, Qiu regards art as a way of social therapy and an agent that can
embody a tranquilizing effect on mundane concerns. Qiu materializes the exhibition’s title piece
(Figure 5.) with a giant calabash made of clear fiberglass and a steel cap shaped like a
hypodermic needle. Black butterflies flutter, pause, or lie still inside the giant calabash and they
are able to breathe from the air coming through the hole in the huge needle. This installation
combines two classical allusions to Zhuang Zi, both of which transmit Taoist ideology and
philosophy. When his frequent interlocutor Hui Shi complained to Zhuang about his failure to
take use of a giant gourd, neither as a bottle nor as a scoop, and he was going to fling it away,
Zhuang replied, “Why don’t you tie it around your waist as buoys when you go floating over the
river or the lake?”
39
Through eluding conventional thinking pattern, Zhuang discovered a new
possibility for a gourd that consequently transforms seemingly opposite notions of uselessness
and usefulness, success and failure. This free realm of thinking evolves into a certain epistemic
elasticity in his dream about a butterfly. Waking up from a dream where he fluttered happily as a
butterfly, Zhuang asked, “Did Zhou dream about the butterfly, or did the butterfly dream about
Zhou?” Although realizing the obvious distinction between a butterfly and Zhuang Zhou, he
sidesteps the division between the dream and reality, the death and life by wu hua (complying to
39
Da Zhonghua Wenku 1999, 13.
25
transformation).
40
This combination of two fables gestures towards a cultural outlook, and a
possible attitude towards life and death, that Qiu intends to preset to people who consider
committing suicide. The butterflies in the fiberglass-made calabash functioned as medicinal
ataraxic through the needle to tranquilize those who are approaching the edge of a bridge. Qiu
leverages ancient Taoist philosophy as a sedative to calm the tensions arising from the historical
burdens of China’s building projects and the anxieties of contemporary life.
Figure 6. Qiu Zhijie, Where is the Capital of Madagascar? 2008, live performance with video
documentation.
On top of offering potential medication, Qiu participates in suicide rescues, assisting in a
way that amalgamates archaeology, sociology, and performativity. Where is the Capital of
Madagascar? (2008) (Figure 6.) is an artist’s intervention regarding a possible suicide induced
by a jilted love. Qiu Zhijie wiped off a possible suicide note written in blood on the bridge’s
railing, which said, “When love vanishes like smoke, the last thing I can do is to forget love,” cut
40
Wu hua( 物化) means complying to transformation. It is a word in literary Chinese and not
related to its meaning in modern Chinese “objectification”. See Da Zhonghua Wenku 1999, 40-
41.
26
open his finger and inscribed graffiti in his own blood on the same spot: “Where is the capital of
Madagascar?”
In the history of Chinese calligraphy, using blood as ink to write a letter was usually
common in three occasions: expressing anger as a form of political protest; being pious when
copying the Buddhist scripture; and forming an alliance. Blood as medium anticipates and
reinforces that all participants are making a solemn vow. The uncertainty and unexpected
question of “Where is the capital of Madagascar?” surprisingly attacks the stereotypical
judgments on significance and pointlessness that ordinary people get used to. It is a hook for
potential suicides and everyone else to draw them away from the suicide intention and their
seemingly hopeless and desperate life on the one hand, and to throw them a new perspective and
to stimulate their curiosities towards the unknown broad world on the other, via Qiu’s non-
sequitur intervention. In that way Qiu’s performance constructs a liminal space where people can
be hesitant between their old recognition and new possibilities, so as to live with ambiguity and
unknown. When people who have the tendency to commit suicide are positioned in this liminal
space, they are out of predicament at the moment and are encouraged to think about infinite
possibilities of the future. Qiu’s social intervention here goes beyond that art merely functions as
therapy through constructing a comfort zone or a sanctuary temporarily but aims to activate art
as a trigger to shape and transform the reality.
One of the most important agendas of Qiu’s Nanjing Bridge project is to trace the history
of Nanjing and its surroundings. This city owns a prominent place in the Chinese history and
27
culture, having served as the capital of various Chinese dynasties, kingdoms, and republican
governments dating from the 3
rd
century to 1949, and has thus long been a major center of
politics, economy, and culture. Yet it has witnessed dynastic successions and historical trauma
such as Nanjing Massacre during the Sino-Japanese War (1931-1945), which resulted in the city
being left with historical ruins and inscribed with permanent fragmented memories. Throughout
the history of the city, it was always in a secondary position that functioned as a backup for
revolutionaries, therefore being connected with “failure.”
The reason why Qiu is intrigued by “failure” of this city is because today’s mainstream
ideology tends to place great value on success, while failure is stigmatized. However, traditional
Chinese philosophy differed in this regard, offering the reclusive lifestyle as a solution for people
who failed to attain success. Historically, there has been a respect for such people. For example,
there is a case of Xiang Yu who was overpowered by Liu Bang in a struggle for political
authority. Yu’s valuable spiritual inheritances are appreciated, even though he was unsuccessful
in his political bid for power. Contemporary China, however, regards success as the single
evaluation standard since the end of revolution, which is counted as an influential cause of
increasing number of people inclined to committing suicide, according to Qiu.
41
The standard of
“success” in the contemporary China is usually marked with the possession of either material
fortune or power. Through tracing this history and presenting it in parallel with the present, Qiu
41
Qiu, “Qiu Zhijie: Indulgence is the Source of His Happiness.”
28
unveils that it is the transformed social structuring in post-revolutionary China and the country
prioritizing rapid economic development that induces the monotonous definition of success. I
contend that this binary cognition of success vs. failure deeply shapes the construction of
individual value systems and impacts personal choices when people are faced with uncertain and
directionless future.
Figure 7. Qiu Zhijie, How to Become a Loser, 2008, performance with photography
documentation. Courtesy of the artist.
Qiu’s response to this overwhelming cultural valuation of success is How to Become a
Loser (2008) (Figure 7.), which is not only a performance initiated for the 3
rd
Guangzhou
Triennial, but also an artwork on the map of “total art” and within the scheme of the Nanjing
Bridge project. The artist drove a car with tire tread refashioned in English and Chinese
characters and a tailor-made inkhorn from Beijing to Guangzhou. When the tires move across the
29
ground, each tire makes a sentence such as “How to become a loser?” and “What have winners
lost?” The ink is released intermittently for the tire to leave sentences on the ground whenever
the artist comes across the word “success” on a passing billboard.
42
The value of “success” has
been promoted and tied with the national ideology since Chinese government pursued rapid
development of political power and economics under the policy of Reform and Opening. The
idea of seeking instant success and quick profits has misled the values of many individuals in this
country. Qiu proposes a counter-value to relieve the pressure of being successful and encourages
people to reconsider the value of being a loser. His running counter to the mainstream value is to
remind Chinese that merely pursuing the fruit of success and degrading failure would obscure
potentials and diversity. He enacts the tires as brushes to write on the ground, switching between
the visible and invisible words, which is coherent with what Meiling Cheng suggests “a free and
open vision,” lying in a fleeting de-visualization of the present moment.
43
The Nanjing Bridge Project is a site-specific project on the one hand; but it is also a
project beyond the physical bridge that aims to connect the past and the future, the bridge and the
world, the individual and the collective or society on the other hand. The continued temporality
and spatiality of the Nanjing Bridge are different from either some other important political
spaces such as Tian’anmen Square or the Great Wall that are contextualized in Chinese canonical
history, or demolition sites in Chinese metropolis like Beijing or Shanghai that are conceived as
42
Qiu Zhijie. Qiu Zhijie: Breaking the Ice: A History. (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2009), 272.
43
Cheng, “De/visualizing Calligraphic Archaeology,” 33.
30
intermediary and transitional stage between the past and the future. This bridge is not only on the
constellation of socialist visual heritage but also continuously facilitating people’s everyday life.
Qiu reorganizes China’s socialist heritage out of the dissatisfaction on simply deconstructing and
consuming histories in the chaotic development of socialist market economy system, de-
centering the formative process of influential political events and their deep impact on the
contemporary society. To understand the contemporaneity in “total art,” it is necessary, as Wu
Hung demonstrates, to map “the particular temporality and spatiality” for an intentional
artistic/theoretical construct.
44
It is clear that “total art,” incorporating various methodologies, interdisciplinary subjects,
and multiple media, is an innovative artistic/theoretical construct. Even though, Qiu contends
that revolutionary art practice can be written into art history, but there is a difference between the
value of the artwork and the value of being included in that art history. Therefore, he cares for
the inner value of artwork and the connection between oneself, the world, and others, instead of
the newness of sites, material, and media. Qiu’s “total art” is distinguished from popularized
cynical realism and political pop art that deconstructs the socialist visual culture and “reconstruct
a true sense of contemporary culture.”
45
44
Wu Hung, “A Case of Being Contemporary: Conditions, Spheres, and Narratives of
Contemporary Chinese Art,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity,
Contemporaneity, ed. Terry Smith et al (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 291.
45
Li Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art,” in China’s
New Art, Post-1989, ed. Valerie C. Doran et al (Hong Kong: Hanart T Z Gallery, 1993), 22.
31
A Cultural Mediator
Just as Chinese literati paid considerable attention to the work and writings of those who
came before, so do many of China’s contemporary artists. They are fascinated by not only
tracing cultural history, but also investigating how history shapes contemporary society. Many
Chinese artists have achieved their eminence in both domestic and global spheres through
representative calligraphic practices, including such well-known artists as Xu Bing, Wu
Shanzhuan, and Gu Wenda. All of them engage in challenging the received perception of
traditional Chinese culture to make their artistic statement through the mediation and
reenactment of calligraphy. Qiu is among this group of artists, but the variety of media and
intentions that he mobilizes in his practices distinguish him from others.
There is a long history of Chinese connoisseurs and collectors inscribing themselves into
the original work by means of inscription and seals, and artists practicing their techniques and
expressing their respect toward earlier artists through the act of copying.
46
I contend that Qiu’s
practices that incorporate and/or copy ancient calligraphy and paintings do not intend to
reinscribe cultural heritage, but acts as a cultural mediator between the ancient and the
contemporary so as to open more possibilities of historiography. In addition to looking at Qiu’s
large-scale Qiu’s Note on the Colorful Lantern Scroll Project (2009-2018), this section will trace
his early works that address similar discourses.
46
Han Byung-Chul, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, trans. Philippa Hurd
(Massachusettes: The MIT Press, 2017), 17.
32
Considering the role that specific media play in Qiu’s practice, I propose examining “total
art” through the idea of mediation. As a broader concept of a medium, mediation has been
proposed to better grasp a constitutive process of social life by scholars in various areas. As
William Mazzarella demonstrates that “All mediation involves the appearance of an ontological
separation between form and content…media are simply formal, neutral tools that may be
applied to any situation…however, mediation is a matter of the greatest intimacy.”
47
Jay David
Bolter and Richard Grusin offer an alternative theory of “remediation” through the lens of media
studies. Examining both old and new visual media, they argue that new visual media achieves
their cultural significance precisely by paying homage to, rivaling, and refashioning earlier
media, further noting that earlier media have refashioned one another as well.
48
This intuitive
way of understanding cultural signification and mediation, along with what Foucault termed an
“archaeology of knowledge,” provides a theoretical ground from which to consider the specific
deployments of media across Qiu’s career. This is not dissimilar to a strategy that Friedrich A.
Kittle deploys to investigate technical media, refreshing the methodology of “media
archaeology” for critical media studies by Jussi Parikka.
49
Parikka further elaborates
“remediation” as a way of critiquing media through making media and even doing media history
differently and bridges media archaeology with art practices to propose a “media-archaeologic
47
William Mazzarella, “Culture, Globalization, Mediation,” Annual Review of Anthropology 33
(January 2004): 356-357.
48
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media. (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1999), 4-5.
49
Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 5.
33
art” that suggests a more non-linear way of understanding past-presents.
50
This methodology is
based on the discourse of media and the revolution of media, yet envisions much broader
discussion on what the relationship between medium and mediation might be.
The reason why I borrow the concept of mediation is due to Qiu’s commitment in the
arena of media art and Chinese avant-garde art in the 1990s. He has been fascinated with
exploring various media and cultural hybridization under globalization since the beginning of his
career. His artworks suggest a transcultural history of media and art. His references to traditions
and art’s histories of calligraphy are neither intended to construct a national Chinese narrative of
contemporary art nor to construct an essential Chinese identity for Chinese art. They are out of
his larger caring for human civilization and history, which is unfolded through the intermedia
relationship between new media and calligraphic practice.
Figure 8. Artist unknown, Colorful Lantern at Shangyuan Festival, 1537-1627, painting.
50
Ibid, 137.
34
Qiu’s Note on the Colorful Lantern Project (2010-2018) is a recent project mobilizing
ancient and contemporary art media and mediating history and nowadays society. Qiu’s ambition
in this work is to break the limit of times and to explore external regularity of history. The
Lantern Project is an ongoing work initiated in 2010 and inspired by the antique scroll known as
Colorful Lantern at Shangyuan Festival (Figure 8.), an anonymous mid-late Ming (1537-1627)
painting that depicted people celebrating Shangyuan festival in the city of Nanjing, the former
capital of Ming Dynasty.
51
This painting adheres to two well-known genres within scroll
painting, a narrative scrolls depicting daily life (feng su hua) and customs and figure paintings
(ren wu hua). The painter portrays a festival market that combines a lantern exhibition and
antiques market, capturing the atmosphere of this traditional festival, and illustrating a detailed
taxonomy of societal relations.
52
To a certain extent, its value is comparable to the most
renowned Chinese genre painting Qing Ming Shang He Tu (Along the River During the
Qingming Festival). The reason why it is unknown is that it has neither artistic attribution nor are
there documents relating to its making. It was not until Qiu showed interest in it and borrowed it
from a Taiwan collector that this painting was exposed in the public.
51
Shangyuan festival is also known as Yuanxiao Festival.
52
Bellini et al., Qiu Zhijie: Journeys without Arrivals, 85.
35
Figure 9. Qiu Zhijie, The First Encounter of the Colorful Lantern Scroll, 2010-2014, detail from
the ink painting. Courtesy of the artist.
Through conducting research on the history and background of this painting, Qiu remade
an enlarged version and added his annotations on different scenarios and characters, which is the
beginning work of this project, The First Encounter of the Colorful Lantern Scroll (2010-2014)
(Figure 9.). The notes on his version of imitation was about his understanding of ancient Chinese
society and ideologies from the contemporary perspective after observing behaviors, expressions,
movements, and interactions between characters on the painting. Through this process, he found
that even though almost one thousand years have passed, there are certain social codes hidden in
the Chinese culture-ideologies that link the past and present. Inspired by the various characters
shown in the painting and typical images in the history, Qiu created an ensemble of objects and
sculptures, each one signifying either characters or patterns that seem to appear and reappear
across human history. The artist hinted at the eternal return of the same archetypes that resurface
36
in time and space across evolution and progress with circularity. By unveiling this mechanism of
recurrence, the artist proposed seeing history as a permanent theatrical rehearsal, thus he
considered the scroll as a narrowed “Jinling theater.”
53
Jinling Theater Portraits (2010-2016)
(Figure 10.) emerged out of this thinking, a series of works that Qiu visualized those typical
figures in the history of China and he wrote introductions and illustrations on the side. Qiu also
made installations and sculptures of those objects to be manipulated by performers and viewers.
For example, Powerful Minister is a round-bottomed bag covered in the typical Mao suit and
topped with a chandelier and red wax candles. The shape of this sculpture indicates that it will
never fall down even if someone touches it and pushes it away due to its low center of gravity. It
apparently contains a political connotation that the powerful ministers have overstepped the line
between them and people who they serve nominally.
Figure 10. Qiu Zhijie, Jinling Theater Portraits, 2010-2016, woodcut prints. Coutersy of the
artist.
53
Qiu Zhijie, “Historical Metaphor and Contemporary Mixture: The Last Chapter of Qiu’s Note
on the Colorful Lantern Project,” interviewed by Meng Xianhui, The Art Newspaper (China),
March 17, 2018. Jinling is the alias of Nanjing.
37
This project has been exhibited in the form of the “Jinling Theater” since 2015. In the last
show of this project in 2018, the artist initiated a live performance in the gallery space and
invited audiences to participate. He put that, “The theater of Jinling could be anywhere and not
limited to certain fixed notion of time and space…Each visitor in the theater is a performer…We
are busy with participating history, but rarely looking at them critically…Those luminous
lanterns are the only spectators of history.”
54
Qiu described it as a “social theater” that
challenges and disrupts binary logic, such as domestic vs. global or avant-garde vs. traditional,
inherent in the Chinese contemporary art from 1978 to 2000. The “theater” functions as a
medium between artwork and societies, between artists and the audiences, between the history
and present. In this formulation, art is not hermetic, making meanings inside the discourse of
contemporary art, but it mediates between various elements of societies. Qiu’s “Jinling Theater”,
I argue, is an example of Wagner’s Gestamkunstwerk; activating and assembling various media
into a whole, to better present work and connect audiences through a sense of shared social
responsibility.
In the opening event of the last exhibition of Lantern Project, Qiu mentioned that when
thinking about the five years that he spent on copying the script of the “Lantingxu” (Preface of
the Orchid Pavilion), he reminded himself that later generations would pay the same attention to
what he left on masterpieces as to how he was concerned about earlier masters—intimating that
54
Qiu Zhijie, Qiu’s speech in the opening event of the last exhibition of Qiu’s Note on the
Colorful Lantern Project at Beijing Minsheng Art Museum. Accessed February 1, 2019,
https://news.artron.net/20180316/n991316.html.
38
the historical present and past are contiguous. However, his research on historical materials not
only paid homage to masters but also challenged stereotypical understanding of canons and
classics as I have argued above. In this way, he is participating earnestly in a long tradition that
predates “total art” and his work.
Qiu’s endurance in copying the historical scroll, mark for mark, visualizes the exact
process of reinterpretation and reconfiguration of history. Each repetition is a consolidation of
reinterpretation and, at the same time, an effacement of past reality. One of the often-repeated
interpretative perspectives of calligraphy is that Chinese have been accustomed to transposing
and reducing calligraphic forms to metaphors and verbal characterizations and using the latter as
pointers and bridges to realms of experience beyond art. Sun Guoting (648? - 703?), in his
Treatise on Calligraphy (Shupu), considers Preface to the Orchid Pavilion as a perfect
representation of Confucian manners, with roamed thoughts and soared spirit as well as
controlled and far-reaching spirit. However, according to Wang Xizhi’s another work
Sangluantie (Letter on the Disturbance), whose style stands in sharp contrast to The Orchid
Pavilion, and historical documentations, he is a person with fiery character who actively involves
in political affairs. In fact, he was reconstructing his characters and embodying the idealized
moral rectitude and personal integrity that was highly prized among the early medieval Chinese
intellectual elite through the practice of calligraphy.
55
Even though there is no way to trace the
55
Martin Kern, “Made by the Empire: Wang Xizhi’s Xingrantie and its Paradoxes,” Archives of
Asian Art 65 (January 2015): 117.
39
“truth” of the present, Qiu suggests a decentralized historical vision and constructs a reformed
dialogue between the individual and the cultural practice of calligraphy. His writing thus invokes
alternative histories and offers critical insights into the assumed connection between the writing
style and the personality and epistemological structures manipulated by single medium.
Qiu is not only an experienced practitioner of traditional Chinese art, but also among the
first group avant-garde Chinese artists who pioneered new media art in the 1990s. His venture in
new media is out of a genuine love for various media, and it is out of strategic considerations for
stimulating a breakthrough for Chinese experimental art. Under this circumstance, new media
such as video and audio tapes was the safest space considering its cooperation with new
technology, which could be seen part of the party’s doctrine of “first productive capacity” and,
thus, likely to be the most immune to the ideology debate.
56
Apart from the imageless calligraphy, Qiu’s exercise in Writing the “Orchid Pavilion
Preface” One Thousand Times is completed with a video documentation of the first fifty
repetitions. However, he alters the presentation of the work on different occasions, sometimes
showing the piece of paper alone, sometimes showing it in combination with the video.
57
The
piece of paper, of course, is the end-product of Qiu’s performance. If it is exhibited without the
video documentation, the viewer only imagines the layering process. Installed with the video, the
emphasis becomes the process of “destroying” or, at the very least, rendering the Orchid
56
Qiu Zhijie, “A Travel Guide for Purgatory,” in The Monk and the Demon, ed. by Feng Boyi
and Qiu Zhijie, (Milan: 5 Continents, 2004), 121.
57
Wu Hung, “TV in Contemporary Chinese Art,” October 125 (June 2008): 83.
40
Pavilion Preface illegible. Meiling Cheng proposes that Qiu’s re-creativity involves “a self-
defacing mechanism,” which means the more he re-creates, the less legible his product becomes,
yielding a by-product that eventually erases references to what’s been re-created.
58
His re-vision
of constructing history and historical research does not intend to retrieve a singular, essential
“truth” of history (which would be difficult to prove and confirm), but to rethink the present
using the visual and material culture of the past. After one thousand repetitions, the words on the
paper are illegible to viewers. The mobilization of illegibility places the viewer in a dualistic
relation outside the artwork, a self-distancing stratagem allows one to see oneself differently in
relation to history, while the video documentation invites spectatorship and raises a viewer’s
awareness of their subjectivity, a self-recognition mediated by the intimacy Qiu’s video. This
involvement of dual-relation is exactly what Mazzarella suggests takes place in all mediation, “a
relation of simultaneous self-distancing and self-recognition.”
59
This mediation has been
prominent to Chinese calligraphic scrolls and painting, which have historically involved
participation and relations embodied in the inscriptions and seals added to the original pieces. As
scholar Han Byung-Chul asserts that “inscriptions not only leave with memory-traces in the
psychic apparatus but also provides numerous testaments of presence.”
60
The culture of
“inscribing” in the traditional Chinese paintings and calligraphy is handed down by generations
58
Meiling Cheng, 383.
59
Mazzarella, 357.
60
Han Byung-Chul, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, (Boston: The MIT Press, 2017), 13.
41
of Chinese artists, which witnesses all mediations between artists, collectors, connoisseurs, and
viewers.
Figure 11. Qiu Zhijie, Writing 10 Tang Poems Backwards, 2000, ink calligraphy and video
documentation. Courtesy of the artist.
Qiu’s intervention in deconstructing calligraphy is not limited to the works I’ve discussed
thusfar. In Writing 10 Tang Poems Backwards (2000) (Figure 11.), he wrote ten Tang poems
inversely, left to right and bottom to up. Every stroke order was written inversely as well. He
also filmed the process of writing and played the video backward, in which the poems are erased
as they are written, turning calligraphy into anti-calligraphy. The calligraphy on paper installed
on the wall thus hangs in paradoxical relationship with the video. Although Writing 10 Tang
Poems Backwards articulates the similar effect of effacement as Coping the Preface, their
strategy and target are totally distinct. Traditionally, calligraphy should be written vertically in
columns from top to bottom and ordered from right to left, with each new column starting to the
left of the preceding one. Writing the Tang poems inversely, Qiu deconstructs the norms of
42
calligraphy through disordering the strokes and characters. Moreover, playing the video
documentation backward, along with the unusual brushstrokes written on papers, transcends the
rendering a particular visual style fixed in the aesthetic of calligraphy, minimizes the content and
the form of calligraphy, and reveals calligraphy as a performance-based action.
In both of Qiu’s interventions in calligraphy, the television in his installation serves a
double function as both a video player and a concrete object. The two aspects signify temporal
and spatial dimensions of an art object through not only a mediation between the presence of the
artist and audiences’ participation but also a remediation of calligraphy as a “zombie media” —
media that are discarded outside normal use in everyday life, but still can have much artistic or
historical value.
61
The video documentation archives the fleeting moments involved in the
writing of calligraphy, while also materializing the process of the effacement and deconstruction
of calligraphy, declaring the limitation of paper as an old infrastructure, attaching calligraphy to
a new one. The television, as a concrete object, also delivers certain information on mediation.
The difference between television and film, photography, and other visual media is that
television mediates the live and the real. Film offers us a world elsewhere, an opportunity
temporarily to set aside our cultural, personal, and economic circumstances, while television
offers us a means of structuring those circumstances on a daily basis.
62
When audiences
61
Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka, “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an
Art Method,” in Leonardo 45, no. 5 (2012): 424–430.
62
Bolter and Grusin, 186.
43
encounter the video on a TV set, they feel familiar with the practice linmo (tracing/copying) as it
is part of daily routine for people who engage with calligraphy. The contradiction between
routine life and illegible actions is exactly what Qiu intends to present to his viewers. If the video
is projected onto a screen or a wall, the mediation will be initiated through a film rather than the
television, Qiu’s practice becomes ever-more distant from their domestic life.
Figure 12. Qiu Zhijie, Monument: Headlines from Newspapers in a Past Time, 2006-2007, ink
rubbings and cement. Courtesy of the artist.
Another significant medium that has shaped calligraphy and its history is the stele.
Monument: Headlines from Newspapers in a Past Time (2006-2007) (Figure 12.) is a work
comprising ink rubbings and cement cubes. In this project, he selects various revolutionary
slogans and discourses from Chinese history, from the first revolution against the Emperor in
300 BC to the most recent ones. Each revolution gives birth to some famous sayings, remarking
44
the ideal and utopian of that historical time. He chiseled the characters on a piece of cement
board, made rubbings from inscriptions on the surface, then covered it with cement again, and
carved the sentence from another revolution again. He repeated this process until it became a
cement cube, akin to certain kinds of Minimalist sculpture. The traces of Qiu’s iterative process
(ink and molding), can be discovered from sides of the sculpture. In addition, he wrote each
aphorism in the style of calligraphy that tallies with the times, so that the 20 layers can be seen as
a reflection of the history of calligraphy as well as the history of revolutionary agendas. The
content, techniques, and physical materials of this work draw from (literal) concrete archives—as
this is what Chinese stele ultimately are. In other words, this practice is informed by archival
work and historical materials, which is a direct way of working like a historian but with different
ends. Qiu’s carving work starts with the slogan “Are the powerful and noble people born with
their standing (wang hou jiang xiang ning you zhong hu),” which is derived from the first large-
scale peasant uprising in the late Qin dynasty (221-207 BC). The work includes some familiar
sayings from similar revolutionary movements in the modern period and Maoist political events
such as the Jintian Uprising, marking the beginning of the Taiping Rebellion and the People’s
Commune Movement. Other quotes and slogans come from the beginning of Chinese
modernization, including “Learn from the foreigners in order to gain command of them (shi yi
chang ji yi zhi yi)”, “Surpass England and America (gan chao ying mei)”, and “Peaceful Rise (he
ping jue qi).” These slogans trace the history of revolution, articulating a regularity in historical
movements. The piling up of the cement, which appears like the layers of an archeological dig,
45
materializes the evolution and accumulation of culture. The cement cube is the metaphor of
culture and history, which seems like an independent event when staring at the surface. But its
genealogy can be traced in profile. This process exactly visualizes Foucault’s “the archaeology
of knowledge” through projecting consciousness onto the past. Qiu’s premise here is similar to
Foucault’s that people’s epistemology is governed by rules and a complex set of discursive and
institutional relationships. The seemingly unrelated historical events and movements that
happened in different times and reasons were intangible interrelated, so were leaders and
activists’ initiatives.
Figure 13. Qiu Zhijie, The Power of Babel, 2003, ink rubbings, a video camera, and a CD player.
Courtesy of the artist.
Qiu’s extensive quotation of steles range from Chinese examples to steles from
elsewhere. In The Power of Babel (2003) (Figure 13.), he made ink rubbings of the Roman steles
from the collection of the Mainz City Museum by using the traditional Chinese method of tabei.
The characters from different steles were rubbed without following their order and thus
46
unrecognizable as a word or sentence, which coordinate with the intention of the construction of
Babel. At the same time, he recorded the pounding sound of rubbing that he considered as the
"answer" from the stele. In the exhibition space, the ink rubbings are hung in mid-air while a CD
player played this pounding sound. A video camera captures the waveform of the sound’s
volume and rhythm dancing up and down. This recorded image was simultaneously projected
live onto the nearby screen, creating unexpected encounters of visitors with a tower of light.
63
Through making rubbings from the Roman steles and disordering their characters, Qiu
deconstructs the presence of the steles and the mediation of languages and knowledge systems.
The unrecognizable words and sentences are reoccurrences of the construction of Babel, while
simultaneously employing the Chinese traditional technique of tabei and Gutenberg printing
technology originating from Mainz, thereby disclosing the cultural exchange and mediation that
paved the way for later globalization. By means of acoustic media and the projection of
visualized sound waves, he recreates an imagined virtual space to bring back to the scene of
making rubbings. Precluding the image of the reproducing process emphasizes the mediation and
communication between the artists and the dead-medium.
In addition to working with video and acoustic media, Qiu scrutinizes calligraphy’s
relation to history and its function in historiography in comparison with photography as a
medium of historical and memorial representation in the series Light Calligraphy (2002—).
63
Qiu Zhijie, Qiu Zhijie: Breaking the Ice: A History, (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2009), 130.
47
Using a torch as a brush, light as a brushstroke, and space as a ground, he coins the term “Light
Calli-photography” as a way of translating calligraphy to photography. The inherent
representational deferral of photography premises viewers’ relationship to the image as an
outsider, which limits the viewer’s intimate and physical participatory relationship with the artist.
Photography differs from calligraphy in that it not only embodies and mediates but also
represents the artist’s body trace in the picture.
64
Figure 14. Qiu Zhijie, All the People I Thought of On September 16, 2002, 2002, photography.
Courtesy of the artist.
64
Hopfener, 52-53.
48
The first endeavor of Light Calligraphy is All the People I Thought of On September 16,
2002 (2002) (Figure 14.), in which Qiu used the light of torches to write the names that he could
think of at that night and with the help of long exposure and flashlight of camera, the trace of
light became a type of calligraphy. According to Jean François Billeter, “The purpose of
calligraphy is to express the dynamic essence of events. It records those ‘expressive moments’
which seem to occur in things, and which in fact are the response of our motorial imagination to
what we see outside us.”
65
The process of writing is recollecting, while recollecting becomes a
ritual through writing. These names are stuck on the starry sky with flash of light. This work
seems more intimate and sentimental than Qiu’s other projects dealing with broader social and
cultural issues. Still, it reflects his ongoing concerns on time, memory, and the cosmos.
Qiu’s intervention in calligraphy is closely connected with his interest in historical
research and is also to the large ambition of “total art.” The historical perspective that permeates
all his practices is to heighten the critical awareness of how the self is constructed according to
specific power structures of historical and social reality. And it is knowledge of one’s own
situatedness that might encourage people to socially intervene and engage in society in order to
change dominant structures of reality. His personal initiatives are catalyzed through various
media to reach out broader audiences to evoke common consciousness. In that case, his artistic
investigation engaging multimedia functions as a mediation not only between the past and the
65
Jean François Billeter, The Chinese art of writing. (New York: Skira/Rizzoli, 1990), 178.
49
present China, but also between art and everyday life, between personal experiences and
collective memories and reality.
Conclusion
This thesis examines the formation and development of the theory and practices of Qiu’s
“total art,” situating it in post-2000s China. In the 1990s and early 2000s, many Chinese
contemporary artists were invited to international biennales and exhibitions, staging narratives
engaged with topical themes featuring identity, diaspora, and globalization. The turning point of
the millennia marks China stepping onto a global stage and achieving an international validation
conferred by being an official member of the World Trade Organization and winning its bid to
host the 2008 Olympics in 2001. Even though China rapidly developed its national power, the
government concurrently intensified censorship in the field of art and culture. Born under this
circumstance, Qiu’s “total art” is “safe” as its ostensible topic is history and gets the permission
to being exhibited in domestic art spaces, even some official art museums (exhibiting
contemporary art in an official art museum is relatively rare in China). At the same time, Qiu
held several large solo exhibitions abroad by cooperating with international institutions, and his
works are often included in overseas group exhibitions. Thus, it is important to explore the
reasons why Qiu’s “total art” is permitted by the domestic art world and welcomed by
international art markets. While some of works discussed above were made prior to 2003, I
believe they nevertheless played an important role in the development of Qiu’s ideas. In
50
analyzing these works, I have paid particular attention to the context, the working process, the
medium, and the exhibition of them in order to assess how the artist actualizes the totality of art
through exhibition-making, and how his explanations of total art are distinguished from his
predecessors.
This thesis outlines the theoretical framework of total art with the aid of the artist’s
geographic illustration, in which he visualizes bridges between Chinese and Western ideologies,
between traditions and revolutions, between theory and practice. Under the guise of his first role,
a socio-political archaeologist, Qiu offers alternatives to deal with potential emotional and
psychological trauma that the rapid development of China since the 1990s left with people. In his
second role as a cultural mediator, Qiu uses his diligent brushstroke to construct dialogue with
history, engaging diverse media to resituate human beings within a trajectory of culture.
In the exploration of total art, Qiu tries to challenge the exclusive and hierarchical system
in the art and exhibitions, engaging people and everyday life as much as possible, and
prioritizing a common humanity that transcends temporality and spatiality. He pays considerable
attention to the reception and distribution of his work, which predetermines his strategies in a
certain way. His concern for the audiences and working process is grounded on the historical and
social research, for example, his investigation of the intense history of the Nanjing Bridge,
comprises a romantic and critical narrative to seek mutual deconstruction and potentially, to
change the reality.
51
Qiu’s “total art” responds to many predecessors’ call and suspicion in terms of the future
of Chinese contemporary art. Some critics and scholars are worried about how Chinese artists
make intense statements through their own narratives under a complicated global market and
political environment. In 1992, Li Xianting called for a unique aesthetic language to signify and
communicate the reality of current times, as contemporary Chinese art comes into its own.
66
In
2008, Wu Hung asserted the “intensity of creative energy” in Chinese contemporary art will
diminish, as it is “normalized” to become a routine aspect of social life.
67
Wu’s accusation is
reasonable on the one hand, considering the social background of artists and their various
approaches to social contexts; but it is arbitrary on the other, because within everyday life is
condensed a comprehensive history of trauma. Qiu’s investigation deals with socialist heritages
in a critical method which is derived from various routines of common people. Yet the totality in
his practice embodies a capacity to propose a solution to fragmented memory and reality for
contemporary China. Thus, Qiu’s “total art” can function as “a unique aesthetic language” that
communicates the historical intensity and the contemporary routine social life.
In his book On Total Art, Qiu elaborates how the raw materials of total art can be the
second-hand material, the conceptual system, the event and its process, and others. All point
towards a notion of making use of life itself as a medium for art practices. The concept is usually
conveyed through language and activities and buried in routine life, which makes artists pay
66
Li, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art,” 22.
67
Wu, “A Case of Being Contemporary,” 304.
52
attention to collective memories, folk tales, rumors, imagination, etc. In this way, artists can trace
the history of each object, mark them with personal traces, and construct ever-new relationships
with them. This book illustrates the definition and objectives of total art, gives detailed
instructions of “training” art, includes all methodologies of total art, and claims the goal of total
art. It is neither an artistic statement nor a didactic theoretical textbook solely attributed to the
artist, but a culmination of pedagogy and practice under the collaboration of Qiu and his students
since the founding of Total Art Studio in 2015.
As a professor at the China Academy of Art, Qiu’s pedagogy is a component of total art
and plays a significant role in the formation of the theory and artistic practices. The manifesto of
total art has been circulated and put into practice through a wide array of classes and workshops
such as Total Art Studio and The Unicorn Workshop. Learning total art is conceived as a
creative process and a transforming force that shapes both reality as well as the individual who
activates it. Qiu’s method has already made a difference on Chinese art academies education and
has shaped the training of later generations of art school graduates. It is a revolutionary progress
that he introduces methodologies of total art into Chinese art institutions, as they challenge the
canonical mode of training under socialist realism that art students have received for a long time.
On the one hand, Qiu brings the strategy of ethnographic fieldwork into the pedagogy of art,
disrupting the conventional training of Chinese art academies that underlines artistic technique;
he also switches subjects from scenery and figures to societies, history, and culture. On the other
hand, he advocates “liveness” or “presence” of artwork and guides students to initiate “live art”
53
or “performance art” by themselves. Although the genre of performance art is common in the
context of contemporary art, it is relatively unusual in the Chinese art institutions. Thus, the
practices and artwork of total art are reflecting the current reality and updating pedagogy of
Chinese art academies, while the methodologies of total art will shape the future of
contemporary art in the post-socialist China with the endeavor of students and participants.
This thesis studies the important and influential Chinese contemporary artist Qiu Zhijie
through the angle of “total art”, which provides a comprehensive context to analyze his
methodology, cultural aspiration, and pedagogical practices. The reasons to examine “total art”
are not only that Qiu proposes a systematic idea for future generations’ and his own practices,
but that this idea is formulated through a unique aesthetic narrative that can signify and
communicate the current reality of China with broader humanistic concerns. Its presence gives a
solution to both old and young generations in China in term of historical trauma and present
political difficulties. At the same time, it gives non-Chinese viewers a glimpse into the past
history and current reality of China and Chinese art. The distribution of contemporary art has
confronted challenges from Chinese party and governments since the 2000s and the situation has
gotten more and more severe as time goes on. “Total art,” is poised to be a “survivor,” playing a
critical role in this particular time period, providing valuable reflection of the society and people
in this country.
54
Bibliography
Adams, David. "Joseph Beuys: Pioneer of a Radical Ecology." Art Journal 51, no.2 (Summer
1992): 28.
Ayas, Defne. Qiu Zhijie: Unicorns in a Blueprint. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Witte de With
Center for Contemporary Art, 2016.
Bellini, Andrea et al. Qiu Zhijie: Journeys without Arrivals. Milano: Mousse Publishing, 2017.
Billeter, Jean François. The Chinese Art of Writing. New York: Skira/Rizzoli, 1990.
Bolter, J. David, and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 1999.
Cheng, Meiling. “De/visualizing Calligraphic Archaeology: Qiu Zhijie’s Total Art.” TDR 53,
no.2 (2009):17-34.
Da Zhonghua Wenku/Library of Chinese Classics. Zhuangzi, published in Chinese and English.
English translated by Wang Rongpei, Modern Chinese translated by Qin Xuqing and Sun
Yongchang. Hunan: Hunan People’s Publishing House, 1999.
Feng, Boyi, and Qiu, Zhijie. The Monk and the Demon: Contemporary Chinese Art. Milan: 5
Continents, 2004.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon, 1972.
Gao, Minglu. Inside Out: New Chinese Art. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, 1998.
Gao, Minglu. Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011.
Han, Byung-Chul. Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese. Translated by Philippa Hurd.
Massachusettes: The MIT Press, 2017.
Henri, Adrian. Total Art: Environments, Happenings and Performance. New York: Praeger,
1974.
55
Hopfener, Birgit. “Qiu Zhijie as Historian: Media Critique as a Mode of Critical Historical
Research.” World Art 5, no.1 (2015): 39-61.
Hopfener, Birgit. “Qiu Zhijie’s Self-Conception as an Artist – Doing Art in a Critical Historical
and Transcultural Perspective.” Journal of Art Historiography 10 (June 2014): 10-34.
Lacy, Suzanne, ed. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press,
1995.
Li Xianting, “Major Trends in the Development of Contemporary Chinese Art,” In China’s New
Art, Post-1989, edited by Valerie C. Doran et al, 10-22. Hong Kong: Hanart T Z Gallery,
1993.
Liu, Kang. “Is There an Alternative to (Capitalist) Globalization? The Debate About Modernity
in China.” Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 23, no. 3 (1996):
193–218.
Liu, Tian. “Map Beyond Boundaries: Qiu Zhijie and Mapping the World Project,” In Bentu:
Chinese Artists in A Time of Turbulence and Transformation, edited by Suzanne Pagé,
Laurence Bossé, Philip Tinari, and Claire Staebler, 117-119. Paris: Hazan, 2016.
Parikka, Jussi. What Is Media Archaeology? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.
Mazzarella, William. “Culture, Globalization, Mediation.” Annual Review of Anthropology
33, no. 1 (October 21, 2004): 345–367.
Qiu Zhijie. Artist talking at UCCA: Gigantism and Plants’ Waiting. Accessed February 1, 2019,
http://cul.sohu.com/20090409/n263295853_3.shtml.
Qiu Zhijie. “Historical Metaphor and Contemporary Mixture: The Last Chapter of Qiu’s Note on
the Colorful Lantern Project.” Interviewed by Meng Xianhui, The Art Newspaper (China),
March 17, 2018.
Qiu, Zhijie. On Total Art. Shanghai: Shanghai Jinxiu Wenzhang Publishing House, 2012.
Qiu Zhijie. Qiu’s speech in the opening event of the last exhibition of Qiu’s Note on the
Colorful Lantern Project at Beijing Minsheng Art Museum. Accessed February 1, 2019,
https://news.artron.net/20180316/n991316.html.
Qiu, Zhijie. Qiu Zhijie: Breaking the Ice: A History. Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2009.
56
Qiu Zhijie, “Qiu Zhijie: Indulgence is the Source of His Happiness.” Interviewed by Kuai Lehao,
Nan Fang Ren Wu Zhou Kan (Southern People Weekly), November 2, 2015,
http://www.jnnc.com/2015/1105/431194.shtml.
Qiu Zhijie. Qiu Zhijie’s Note on Archives (2008). Accessed Feb 1, 2019,
http://www.qiuzhijie.com/worksleibie/zhuangzhi/e-danganguan.htm.
Mazzarella, William. “Culture, Globalization, Mediation.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33
(January 2004): 345-367.
Qiu Zhijie, “The Total Artistic Creation Based on Social Survey: Experimental Teaching in Total
Art Studio of China Academy of Art,” Northern Art (March 2007), 58-61.
Qiu Zhijie, “Why do I Practice Chinese Calligraphy?” in UnicornArt WeChat Subscription,
December 5, 2014, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/3aC1yemgVPzCW2zh5E2lMA.
Smith, Matthew Wilson. The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace. New
York: Routledge, 2007.
Tang, Xiaobing. Visual Culture in Contemporary China: Paradigms and Shifts. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Wu, Hung. “A Case of Being Contemporary: Conditions, Spheres, and Narratives of
Contemporary Chinese Art,” In Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity,
Contemporaneity, edited by Terry Smith et al, 290-306. Durham: Duke University Press,
2008.
Yen, Yuehping. Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society. New York:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
Abstract (if available)
Linked assets
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
Conceptually similar
PDF
The globalization of contemporary Chinese art: biennales, large-scale exhibitions, and the transnational work of Cai Guo-Qiang
PDF
Prospering in resistance: the performance art of Zhang Huan from the 1990s to 2000s
PDF
Contingent practice: contemporary methods in art process dependent on architecture of the exhibition space
PDF
Transcendent hybridities: Lu Yang's interrogation of gender, technology, and "Chineseness" in contemporary
PDF
Performing excess: the politics of identity in La Chica Boom
PDF
Queer nightlife networks and the art of Rafa Esparza, Sebastian Hernandez, and Gabriela Ruiz
PDF
Cao Fei: rethinking spatial dynamics discourse
PDF
The trouble with Radical Women: anti-Blackness, Latinidad, and contemporary curating
PDF
Teaching freedom: the power of autonomous temporary institutions and informal pedagogy in the work of Tania Bruguera and Suzanne Lacy
PDF
Poetry as a political tool: text and image in the narrative of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
PDF
Orientalism and Chinoiserie: Chinese culture in the western fashion industry
PDF
A picture is no substitute for anything: intertextuality and performance in Moyra Davey’s Hujar / Palermo
PDF
Evaluating art for social change: the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and the Los Angeles Poverty Department in relationship to Tania Bruguera’s concept of Arte Útil; Evaluating art for social cha...
PDF
Subverting madness: on translating the mental illness memoir into a curatorial practice
PDF
Ableism in the U.S. art context: curators, art museums, and the non-normative body
PDF
Redress: gender and power in Saudi Arabian art
PDF
The myth of memory: interpretations of site, memory, and erasure in Los Angeles.
PDF
Porous bodies: contemporary art's use of the osmotic as a means of reconfiguring subjectivity
PDF
Art collaborations in fashion brand spaces
PDF
Quilting bodies: the Gee's Bend Quilters, Sanford Biggers, and Jonathan VanDyke
Asset Metadata
Creator
Wu, Wenzhuo
(author)
Core Title
Totality: theory, practice, and pedagogy in Qiu Zhijie’s “Total Art”
School
Roski School of Art and Design
Degree
Master of Arts
Degree Program
Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere
Publication Date
04/25/2019
Defense Date
04/24/2019
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Chinese contemporary art,media art,OAI-PMH Harvest,Qiu Zhijie,social practice,total art
Format
application/pdf
(imt)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Campbell, Andy (
committee chair
), Cheng, Meiling (
committee member
), Chio, Jenny (
committee member
)
Creator Email
wenzhuo.wu95@gmail.com,wenzhuow@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-145252
Unique identifier
UC11662696
Identifier
etd-WuWenzhuo-7260.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-145252 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-WuWenzhuo-7260.pdf
Dmrecord
145252
Document Type
Thesis
Format
application/pdf (imt)
Rights
Wu, Wenzhuo
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
Chinese contemporary art
media art
Qiu Zhijie
social practice
total art