Breaking through the ice-the Sinking Giant, 2009, iron and acrylic board. l600x500x400cm, photo by. Oak Taylor-Smith Courtesy UCCA.

Micro Functional Analysis: From Ink Painting to Theater

Yuling Zhang_Art Critic

Qiu Zhijie is a functionalist or someone we expect. When he builds a massive project of precise and delicate functional structures, he focuses on the most invisible changes in  society or history, not on the viable terms of essence, spirit, or awareness. His interest lies within the indescribable relationships among these changes, how they change in interaction with somewhat trivial events, and especially whether we can complete highly difficult and dangerous ideological operations today. It is very easy to misunderstand and incur conflicts because functional structures are not symbolic structures. When a function is misunderstood, the entire production mechanism breaks away from the right track. Also, behind every misunderstanding hides a certain type of politics.
The third part of the Chang River Bridge Project in Nanking ? The first piece that greets the audiences at the entrance is 30 Letters to the Roofing Tiles of Qiu’s, which consists of 30 pieces of ink paintings. Most audiences are overwhelmed by its welcoming yet rejective ambience. In fact, the texts are excessively small and illegible. These paintings have esoteric vocabularies and rhythms, just as the exhibition’s keel structure, but it is for creation and not for interpretation. It is certainly difficult for people to capture the words and rhythms when they first hear a statement or a verse of a song.
Simply put, the textual resources of the Chang River Bridge Project are the soil where 2D art grows and the 2D art are the plants of installation. Similar to printmaking, the boundaries of oil painting are mostly related to Qiu Zhijie’s instrumental imagination. Two aspects of his imagination have been incarnated in this exhibition: Charge by Consumption, which consists of a large pencil and pencil sharpener, and Even What Disappears in an Instance Is an Element of the Universe. These two pieces take the western and eastern ends of the space. The west is filled with pencil shavings that penetrate the clouds to go into the water, a trunk of a pencil that is waiting to go into the pencil sharpener, and the battery connected to each pencil lead that is lighting up a small light bulb at the end. The daily commodities diffused by two large cement chimneys to the east are filling the east wall. Beneath them are the sections of a few cement chimneys, among which is a small opening for the smoke, which is printed with various small tools and seem to absorb our spirits. These are the two shocking pieces. These have no friendly, poetic ambiences of I Have Already Changed 72 Times, made of bamboo. Rather, they are close to the mental confusion of Gonggyeongdoha（Please do not cross the water. What do I do; my love has drowned while crossing the water? Poem Gonghuin: Legend has it that a drunk man walked into the river and drowned even after his wife tried to stop him. The wife, watching him drown by the river, sang this poem.). The slight aesthetic pleasure that is engendered by the reason of insanity that stops the steps while mourning over the loss by the river represent the schizophrenic mentality of the Chinese people.
The origins of such poetic atmosphere can be intuitively sensed by the ink paintings that are based on it. The origins are the nature and machinery, the visual characteristics of the 2D pieces in Qiu Zhijie’s entire project. Machinery (mathematics) and biology (animals and plants) create the atmosphere of artistic enlightenment and Cheongonggaemul (the comprehensive ancient scientific publication of China). Where there is a machine, the meaning of time is inevitably included and the pencil sharpener symbolizes operation and combination. Where there are biological creatures, the meaning of life and death underlies. Even pencil shavings include a certain physical form that grows and changes. When the body of a baby meets the steel rods of a bridge-that is when an artistic machine meets a politically revolutionary machine-they become a set of toothed wheels to operate the exhibition or the entire Chang Jiang Bridge Project. The reason why this is abstruse is because the former cannot be simplified by the latter, and the latter cannot be simplified by the former.
All of the visual elements come from one philosophical faith. Regardless of whether the artist himself wants to unveil it or not, Qiu Zhijie has never truly believed in ‘objects (characters).’ Rather, he has been obsessed with ‘events.’
The exhibition solely relies on papers hung on the walls, but he intends to create various routes and processes. The scissors, the crane, the parachute, and the ventilation system…… Every part of the machine is operating. The dragon, the crane, the shrimp, and the crow wrestle and the lotus flower and the apples fall…… It is difficult to avoid all these universal elements.

Diploma No. 3, 2009, iron board, cement, crops, fiberglass, iron characters and red flags, photo by Oak Taylor-Smith Courtesy UCCA.