Qiu Zhijie’s Exhibition Review

Jan. 26th

I went to the afternoon session of Qiu Zhijie’s exhibition.

The Talbot Rice gallery has a double -floor exhibition hall for Qiu’s works, which helps to build the whole experience for the audiences to immerse in the atmosphere created by the dim light and the vintage touch from all the traditional Chinese-painting styled artworks.

His large scale paintings are impressive in terms of the narrative. They are seemingly simple paintings of maps that used to be applied during ancient war, yet has lots of words adding mystery when the audiences are trying to understand the hidden message and not only see them as just art. I like how the artist hide the translation of his words and make them only reveal under ultraviolet light in one of his paintings. The first-sight mystery and the distant created by cultural difference is reserved, and draw the audiences to further dig the meaning of the painting.

On the second floor, I appreciated his use of color. Generally, his brush stroke is bold, but he also kept certain delicate thin lines in contrast color among those mass color patches to add sensitivity. I personally think his words sometimes are ambiguous and make no sense. When I talked with my friend, she also thinkS some of the words which suggest the place names seemed to be suitable in video games. Perhaps this is the artist’s intention for bringing his audiences surrealistic experience.