Qiu Zhijie's maps are always related to such secrets, some of which are revealed, while others are given new hiding places.
Secrets require a great deal of effort to acquire and preserve, and a special kind of container to hold them, like hosting the surges and sighs of an entire ocean in a conch shell. Qiu Zhijie's map is the very vessel for these secrets.
Revealing and weaving at the same time, Khoo's map, that is, is alchemy and a grimoire. It is the nearest distant place and the door to time and space. It often leaves one in contradictory emotions, combining the overwhelming inevitability of big data rushing in overwhelmingly, with the exhilaration of suddenly discovering a gold mine in the brain circuit. Everything is inextricably linked to those secrets about the world.
Qiu Zhijie had also walked among these secrets, using his physical body to become a map. Before creating this map of the whole world, Qiu Zhijie had measured the world himself, using his own body as a pen and the earth as paper, to approach step by step the flesh hidden in the map. This is his 2006 work The Railway from Lhasa to Kathmandu, and long before then he was already exploring the secrets in the map.
This work is related to the historical figure who first mapped Tibet. According to Qiu Zhijie's research, in 1863 a 33-year-old Indian man named Nan Singh was given a secret mission: to measure Tibet. He had to cross China's Tibet and reach Lhasa from the Himalayan side of the mountain range, which is located in India. All he has at his disposal is his own body. Before setting off, he underwent a two-year training programme that gave him exactly 33 inches per stride. From his steps, he extrapolated the length of the journey. Every step he took became data which later on accurately mapped the Tibetan plateau. While there were undoubtedly complex historical and political motivations behind this map, what fascinated Qiu Zhijie even more was the physicality inherent in it, the fact that every single piece of data in this map flowed through Nan Singh's body. So Qiu decided to walk the opposite route - from Lhasa to Kathmandu - on foot. Qiu Zhijie used the same technical means of calculating latitude and orientation as he had used with Nan Singh in the first place, and all the data generated on his body became the core of this work. Qiu Zhijie has put a pair of shackles on his feet to limit his pace, making each step he takes 33 inches, the same as Nan Singh's back then.
It was an incredibly arduous journey, with Khoo completing 800 of the 1,100 kilometres in 2006 and the rest of the distance in 2007. His feet were bruised and bloodied from rubbing due to the shackles he was wearing, but he insisted on walking it all. The pain he felt on the way was part of the work, and it was only by taking on this pain in his own flesh, and forming a memory from it, that he could truly echo the Nan Singh of his day. Like a religious ritual, the sacrifice and pain of the flesh to arrive at the hardship and perseverance of the mapmakers 150 years ago, Qiu Zhijie also wants to make the data part of the flesh, while making the flesh part of the data. Already embedded in this work is an important sensual dimension in his subsequent mapmaking. Although the making of the map is a process of abstraction and refinement, Qiu Zhijie will never abandon the power of sensuality as a result. The co-existence of abstraction and sensuality is a fundamental attribute of the maps he creates.
There are always traces of connections between all things, and in order to perceive the echoes of distant time and space, extremely specific individual experiences become the channels of resonance. These resonances and reverberations in time and space are the mutual selection between fate and chance, the secrets contained in the maps, and the unique value of the maps created by Qiu Zhijie.
People are often shocked at the sheer volume of information in Qiu Zhijie's maps, and the wonderful combinations of relationships between the information. This is only the first dimension in understanding his maps, and only the entry point into their creation. This entrance is complex and complicated, for the map contains enough information to plunge anyone who sees it for the first time into an ocean of knowledge and information.
Qiu did not create such a vast amount of information to prove his erudition; it is related to his methodology of creating maps, which is ambitiously exhaustive, attempting to encompass all possible information and clues under one point of knowledge into his maps. Chiu creates maps with an obsession to find the unknown for mankind. He seeks assiduously to ask what we already know, what we could know, and what we do not yet know. For him, the nearest distant place is not the known, but the unknown.
Qiu Zhijie once said of his map-making: "Maps are not about producing understanding, they are about producing knowing. To understand what is before and after, to understand where the road is, where the road should go, to draw a map in order to find out the way." He refers to this selection of information as "no omissions" (nothing is left out) - everything that can be known is brought to light. To be more precise, everything that can be named is included in his maps. This is his genealogy of knowledge, in which he uses objective information and subjective perceptions as bricks and mortar, and the map as the skeletal structure of the building, creating a unique view of the world on a two-dimensional plane. In this genealogy of knowledge, power relations are not his primary concern, but rather the connections and flows between the named objects. He linked everything with mountains, rivers, lakes and seas, as well as with the circulation between railways.
There is no doubt that Qiu Zhijie's maps are his alchemy of the world and his worldview. Walking through Qiu Zhijie's maps, one often gets lost in a land of surprising discoveries and falls into absurdity in the midst of a wonderful intellectual thrill. This alchemy has a specific recipe, as it incorporates Qiu Zhijie's refinement of his own life and perception. It is inextricably linked to his 'craft' of making maps. This 'craft' mobilises all of Qiu Zhijie's knowledge, abilities and accumulation. Qiu Zhijie's use of ink and brushes, derived from his childhood life, is the starting point for all his artistic thinking. His background in landscape painting has allowed Qiu Zhijie to be comfortable with the layout of mountains and rivers and seas on maps, and the calligraphy in his blood has allowed him to work out the most appropriate fonts for map expression. Qiu Zhijie's hunger for comprehensive human knowledge and his extensive knowledge system are also projected in the maps, as is his love of literature and his imagination, untouched by the world, in their construction. As a key participant in the decades of Chinese contemporary art, Qiu Zhijie has always kept himself in the midst of the agitation of different ideas, striving to connect the East with the West, the ancient with the modern, keen to eliminate blind spots, and to expand his intellectual map. This is his approach to knowledge: to exhaust the possibilities in the known world, and thus the unknown world is infinite in its frontiers.
I once asked him what the pleasure of making maps was. He said that sometimes people are always stuck in the same latitudes, but perhaps with one more latitude the answer will come to them. The map is a way of presenting these latitudes and then looking beyond the known latitudes and longitudes to find the way out and the answers.
In this flat, capitalist world and digital age, it is difficult to find the "pathos". Qiu Zhijie quietly hides this trust in his maps, fusing mischief and desolation, youthfulness and intellectualism. There is a world view in the map, and behind the map is the love and pain of the artist.
He has obsession and greed - in the map there are 5,000 years up and down, learning from the East and the West, and white clouds and pale clouds. Painting all the nodes of knowledge in the world, storing all the possibilities in those left white. Qiu Zhijie works tirelessly to gather information, deducing the mountains and rivers on the map in a mind map, sketching them over and over again, from notebooks to piles of small drafts in his studio. With great skill, Qiu places a wealth of information within the map, complemented by a great imagination that brings serendipity and fluidity to the map. Cartography is supposed to be a process of visualising knowledge into images with certain rules, a distillation of information and a petrification of knowledge. Qiu Zhijie wants to bring the vibrant serendipity back into the map, where the distilled information still has a pulse, a breath, a flow and a variation. He wants his maps to have life, to continue to grow, to never end.
Qiu's maps are the ideal vehicle for the 'Gesamtkunstwerk' (total art) to which he has been committed. He has said that he would prefer to replace the term 'total art' with the term 'through art'. Through art, his ideal of art, is the 'simultaneous fulfilment of inner personal freedom and outer social responsibility', the 'mutual promotion of rational research and emotional activism', and the 'mutual nourishment of the various aspects of the work undertaken'. It is the idea that 'all aspects of the work undertaken can feed each other without contradiction, and that subversive artistic experience and everyday life can find a point of contact and be interconnected'.
Qiu Zhijie's view of art is his view of the world; he believes that art is about solving life's problems and social issues, and that true art is not just about making art, but about the world into which it is invested. Qiu Zhijie's maps are not obtained by measurement, but by action, by physical labour and perception, and by intellectual digestion through great mental labour. His maps are a product of his 'art of penetration', a work and an action. The map is a coded book that he left to the world. The reader who acquires the true transmission can reap the benefits of several worlds based on Qiu Zhijie's maps.
One of Qiu Zhijie's considerations in choosing maps as a means of creation is to let everyone reap the benefits of their own maps, while navigating through the dense forest of history and specialising in words and logic. This is also based on Qiu Zhijie's perception of the world: the world is never flat.
In linearly logical texts and works with clear directions, the viewer receives a given message. Qiu Zhijie's maps remain open-ended, and he wants each viewer to collage his or her own unique map according to his or her own knowledge structure and comprehension.
The creation of maps that exist as alchemy is not enough to explain the fascination of these maps. The fascination of the map is not only in the 'known' that it marks, but in the 'unknown' that it does not yet mark. Qiu also explains his fervour for knowledge extraction: "It's a quest for security, when you can put it on a map, you can use it as a basis to face the unknown. Unknown territory can be touched by these things that exist. Otherwise it would be mysterious, even imperceptible. Once the knowledge map is composed, there is an opportunity to reach those parts that actually exist, but are less perceptible."
Influenced by the philosopher Wittgenstein, Qiu does not forget the difference between the 'energy' and 'reference' of the world, nor does he ignore the existence of the 'unspeakable'. Wittgenstein insisted that we make clear what can be said; we should remain silent about what cannot be said. Qiu Zhijie's map responds differently, stating what can be said and referred to, while the unspeakable and secrets will remain hidden until the moment they are discovered. These unnamed things, those paths that have not yet been perceived, are precisely what Qiu Zhijie calls 'the way out'. To create a map is to reach the world beyond it.
"For me, maps are like highways that help travellers reach the wilderness before they get there. The most exciting thing is actually when you start exploring in the wilderness, when you start going off-road. But without having that knowledge, you're wasting time going in circles in places that aren't virgin territory. So we should use some means to quickly cross these neighbourhoods that countless people have walked through, it's been named, explored, explored, and those things should be converted into their own experience very quickly and with very effective means. But the goal of doing that is to quickly skim over those things to get to the things that you need to bring out all your sensibility to face. So for me, this knowledge-gathering fetish is about saving time".
"The map is there to get you to places that the map doesn't describe as quickly as possible, not to get you in the place over and over again. You don't need a map for places you know well, but to get to those places that the map doesn't describe as quickly as possible." He said firmly.
Qiu himself probably underestimates the true value of these maps in this sense, and his map creation is a retrograde, Don Quixotic shock in this age of big data. Another important artistic project that Qiu is working on at the same time is artistic research related to artificial intelligence. He expects to be able to train an AI that thinks like him to do most of his work (teaching, lecturing and other repetitive tasks), so that Qiu himself can go on to create more freely. He wants to pour his heart out to another intelligence that could become his own in order to force himself to keep coming up with new things and arrive at a place he has never been before.
"It is when we are in a dilemma that we really start to use our judgement. Because left and right is when art is needed." He makes maps in order to find places where he can get lost. Establishing certainty is the pursuit of places where the balance is lost.
It is the indigestible contradictions that are the truly valuable issues. Thus Map Creation and Art AI - two different art projects - share a similar logic: a starving artist, constantly exploring, devouring and digesting what the world may give him, while constantly crystallising these uniquely personal experiences into works, no longer holding on to what he has already completed and strives to expel them from his body. His creative process of exhausting all possibilities on the map is like trying to take out all the relevant knowledge in his head and put it into the known world. His goal, after this, is to ask: what else is possible? Qiu's maps, in their intensity and density, are indeed an alchemy of worlds and worldviews, but they are much more than that: they constantly touch the boundaries of the original world, forming and shaping new 'tentacles' within it. It renames words and objects, blurring the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction in a literary way.
He who seeks the secret, the secret will seek him out.
When the Chicago Art Museum in the United States approached Qiu Zhijie, he was surprised to discover that the Chicago Art Museum was one of the venues for the World Congress of Religions in 1893. That year, religions that had each developed over thousands of years in different parts of the world met face to face for the first time. The Japanese monk Sokyon spoke about Zen Buddhism, translated by the later influential Suzuki Daishonin, while the Hindu Swami Vivekananda charmed a large American audience with his charismatic presentation style, thus beginning the spread of Indian religion to America. What began as a Catholic-Christian self-proclaiming conference unexpectedly became a landmark meeting of minds in a great convergence of world cultures. Qiu made a new work for this occasion, in which he created four concrete piers. Layered on top are the important events and constituent elements of each religion, one representing Buddhism, Shintoism and Zen, one for Hinduism, one for Islam, and one for Judaism and Christianity. From the origins of each religion to the scene where the 1893 Congress took place.
The evolution of religion, like the growth of a tree, is layered on top of each other, containing in each moment all the developments of the past. This work is an important piece in Qiu Zhijie's exploration of world religions and theological thought. The reflections therein are also projected in the creation of his maps. In his Map of Religions, he again refers to the Global Conference of Religions of 1893, which appears as a lake, as an important moment of encounter between world religious thought in the context of globalisation, and a crucial moment when different religious ideas flowed like ocean currents into different cultural oceans. Qiu Zhijie wants to name it on the map, to summon it with his work at the site where this event took place back then. At that moment, different times and spaces echoed at this point as if light and light were reflecting each other.
As early as 2005, when he curated the exhibition 'Archaeology of the Future', Qiu Zhijie already began to think about how Chinese people view time. In his map there is no linear time, history always travels mysterious paths back and forth. The hidden secrets flash back and forth between days and months.
What is the use of a map in a world that is so vast. What he wants to depict is the meridian and cause and effect of everything, the landscapes of mankind and civilisation. Maps are always made to reveal the secrets of the world, and Qiu Zhijie ambitiously wanted to traverse several different worlds of the mind and collage them together with maps. Khoo has been physically making maps in the flesh. At the end of 2020, another of his exhibitions, Lecture, consists of 15 lectures and live broadcasts. This exhibition is essentially an action, a concentrated performance that engages the public's attention and provokes discussion, but it is still the artist's body, his intensive labour, his time commitment, his tirelessness that brings the real intensity to the "action". With over 5,000 pages of PowerPoint, like a huge map of action, Qiu Zhijie carries out his usual style of hunger and thirst, letting as much knowledge as possible pass through his body, inputting and then outputting a great deal. This time the output took the form of lecture after lecture. It is an ongoing performance in which the body is used to present a map of knowledge in time. But the Lecture does not create a violent chemical reaction with the court of public opinion. Qiu Zhijie anticipated this outcome, saying that "our lecture was doomed to failure". The artist's heartfelt speech became a distant, vague cry in the wilderness, amidst the rapid spread of capital and the fierce winds of political correctness. It is clearly a show full of tragedy. But this does not detract from the value that this exhibition offers, for the Lecture is an honest question. It is a question to which every artist, every creator, should respond: what does the artist offer to the world, really?
The visible map, the image that Qiu Zhijie offers, the invisible map is hidden in the Lecture. The meaning of Qiu Zhijie's maps may not be fully perceived by us at the moment, until we are able to discover the secrets that are hidden from us by him. Perhaps Qiu Zhijie also stored many secrets in his maps that he himself had not yet discovered - the unknown is a gift to humanity.
In an interview with Qiu Zhijie, he said that when creating maps, he encounters "an invisible connection" and a "breakdown of classification". "When the classification collapses, there is a kind of romance that comes out." He says with delight.
"What kind of romance"?
For example, in the course of research on tools and food, it suddenly becomes clear that "we're actually baking bread in a very small building.
" Don't you think this whole thing is romantic?" Qiu Zhijie winked mischievously.
Article source: Life Monthly
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