La Qiu Zhijie exhibition will remain open until the 18 August and is the first stage of New Roads, a three-year project of international collaboration between China and Italy, born from the desire to create a platform for multicultural dialogue through contemporary art.
There are three institutions involved: Querini Stampalia Foundation of Venice and Shanghai Aurora Museum which, through the fundamental intervention of intercultural and artistic mediation by Arthur Asia, compare their history and their collections, analyzing and expanding them through projects commissioned from contemporary artists.
Considered in the Chinese art scene as a true intellectual, in the Renaissance sense of the word, Qiu Zhijie is a thinker, a poet and, through his cartographies, an archivist of knowledge. As an artist Qiu Zhijie defines his way of working as "total art", the awareness that artistic creation cannot be uprooted and taken away from the historical and cultural context that surrounds it and that has caused it.
The specific works of Qiu Zhijie, as well as all the previous contemporary art projects of the Conservare il Futuro program, developed since 2000 at the Querini Stampalia Foundation, have been conceived in relation to the objects of the permanent collection.
In this case, the comparison and analysis extend further, building conceptual and stylistic bridges between the works of the Venetian Foundation and the precious Asian collection of ancient art of the Aurora Museum in Shanghai. A selection of images from the two collections, projected in one of the rooms, helps the viewer to retrace the formal suggestions that guided and inspired the artist.
Among these is the map of Venice by Jacopo de' Barbari, of which one of the eleven sixteenth-century copies existing in the world belongs to the Querini Stampalia Foundation, exhibited here in an open dialogue with the work of Qiu.
Looking at the artist's maps, the reference to the organicity and fluidity of the map of Venice becomes intuitive, sinuous and dense, and curiously zoomorphic. Qiu Zhijie builds his maps by identifying a system of typological and symbolic cells that aggregate one to the other, as in the urban fabric of the Serenissima, giving life to extraordinary and organic cartographies which, like large overturned tapestries, tell of the many knots and threads that hold them together.
Through his maps, made using the ink dabbing technique – traditionally used to reproduce lapidary writings on paper supports – or simply by Indian ink painting on the walls of the exhibition area, Qiu Zhijie talks to us about how traditions, religions, the objects by which we are, sometimes unconsciously, surrounded.
In the Map of the Busy Gods, iconographic images are grouped into space- and time-free paradigms. A river runs through the territories of all deities. Starting from creation and descending towards Chaos we meet the earth and the natural elements. Beyond the mountains to the north, astral deities oversee human affairs; Agriculture, Protection and War. On the southern shore, Love, Wine and Art.
A little further east is Hell, while the mouth is governed by the marine gods and on the banks facing it, motherhood is preceded by wisdom. By eluding geographical distance and unmasking those centuries-old prejudices accumulated in the course of cultural exchanges between East and West, Qiu Zhijie's cartographic approach traces, discovers and highlights the connections between the two museums but also between Shanghai and Venice, united by multiple aspects between including the innate nature of openness and exchange, typical of cities overlooking the sea.
The unpublished series of maps by Qiu Zhijie illustrates the bizarre misunderstandings arising from the relations of cultural exchange between Italy and China and, in a broader sense, between West and East. Through multiple historical, philosophical and figurative references, the artist not only guides us in the history and evolution of these mystifications, but helps us to discover how such misleading interpretations can prove fundamental in the revelation of new and unexpected transcultural analogies. The title of the exhibition The Unicorn and the Dragon.
A cartography of the collections of the Querini Stampalia Foundation, Venice and the Aurora Museum, Shanghai finds inspiration in Umberto Eco's conference – “They were looking for unicorns” – held at the University of Peking in 1993. The scholar, in an analysis of the mechanisms from the comparison and discovery of different cultures, he points out a certain tendency, which has continued through the centuries, to classify foreign symbols, notions and concepts, adapting them to one's own systems of cultural references.
The most sensational example cited by Eco is precisely that according to which Marco Polo, seeing a rhinoceros during his travels in the East, immediately identified it as a unicorn, following the only possible classification that Western tradition had made available for him. define a creature with a horn.
It is very easy to identify Marco Polo's obvious mistake, but what Qiu Zhijie is able to reveal to us is that in reality, even in the Chinese tradition there has always been a unicorn, which is neither a horse with a horn on its forehead, nor a rhinoceros. The Chinese unicorn is in fact a mythological figure called Bixie or Tianlu which, in some representations belonging to the Aurora collection, is surprisingly similar to the winged lion of San Marco.
In the Map of Mythological Animals, the artist identifies the mechanisms that define the creation of zoomorphic entities in all cultures. The ramifications of the large tree that dominates the map lead us to the discovery of extraordinarily limited and recurring categories: combinations of men, animals and plant motifs, polycephalic creatures with many bodies, positions and defined roles.
The leit motif of all the works pushes to remove geography and chronology to discover a concrete commonality between all cultures and the mechanisms that govern them. Each of these maps is in fact, according to the artist, an allusion to the most etymological and literal definition of the concept at the basis of Taoism: the Tao, or the course of things.
Maps therefore show us the only possible form, the universality and the limits of creation and imagination to which all cultures invariably reach. Hence the presence of the unicorn both in Asia and Europe, a creature which, albeit with different forms, represents the same search for purity and sensitivity. The artist's work also aims to focus on the process of transformation of those images which, although already structured by ancient grafts of forms, are then "contaminated" and transformed by the interaction and communication between cultures.
In his practice Qiu Zhijie maintains a close relationship between creation and manual skill, and in his work of mapping cultures he has explored the craft techniques mentioned in the three sculptures on display: the two unicorns, whose iconography recurs in Chinese culture, they are in fact made with typically Asian techniques and materials such as bamboo and camphor wood, while the unicorn conceived from the Western tradition was made in Murano glass by master Pino Signoretto. Qiu Zhijie was born in Fujian Province, China in 1969.
In 1992 he graduated from the Engraving Department of the National Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou. He lives in Beijing. He is an artist, critic and curator. He is known for his calligraphy, photography and video installation works. His works have been exhibited worldwide: Inside Out: New Chinese Art, PS1 Museum, New York and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998; Beijing in London, ICA, London 1999; Power of the Word, Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, Iowa, USA 2000; Translated Acts, Haus Der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and Queens Museum, New York, 2001; 25th Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil.
In the mid-90s he also wrote about Conceptual Art and Performance Art, arriving at the so-called controversy of meaning, the most important theoretical debate in the Chinese art world. In 1996 Qiu Zhijie co-organized Phenomena&Image, the first video exhibition art at the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou and publishes two books which include the most important documents in the history of video art in the world, becoming an important reference point in the field of art and new technologies in China.
In 1999 he curated the Post-sense Sensibility – Alien Bodies & Delusion exhibition in the basement of a residential building in Beijing, dedicated to the extremely experimental works of the new generation, thus becoming a prominent personality and spokesman for the new national artistic avant-gardes. In 2001 he was one of the chief editors of the important magazine "Next Wave" and in 2002 he became co-curator of the Beijing art collective Long March Project. Querini Stampalia Foundation Santa Maria Formosa Castello 5252, 30122 Venice
