Qiu Zhijie (邱志杰）

Qiu Zhijie was born in 1969, during the later phase of the Cultural Revolution in Zhangzhou, southern China. HE graduated from the printmaking department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Art), Hangzhou in 1992. Since the 1990s he has become one of the most active conceptual artists in China, and Considered an intellectual force in the contemporary Chinese art world

An artistic scholar whose practice challenges traditional philosophies in direct relation to the social condition of contemporary China, Qiu Zhijie’s multifarious practice embraces a diverse range of media, from printmaking, video, photography, performance, sculpture and painting.

Qiu, who has kept abreast of contemporary Western discourse since his youth, began returning to traditional Chinese art at the end of the 1990s.

From the investigation of the written word in Chinese traditional culture through calligraphy, to the investigation of historical monuments/places (such as Tibet and Nanjing Bridge), Qiu Zhijie consistently questions the cultural foundations upon which contemporary China is understood and perceived, from both a national and international perspective. Concepts of time, cultural memory, the meaning and role of historical consciousness, the questioning of what constitutes the ‘contemporary’, all of these and more are important subjects to which Qiu uniquely investigates.