Qiu Zhijie
APT9
Born 1969 Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, China
Lives and works in Beijing, China
With its origins in calligraphy, Qiu Zhijie’s practice has evolved through a range of media, idioms and cultural frameworks to arrive at a notion of ‘total art’ — a multi-disciplinary, trans-historical approach to knowledge, culture and daily life. His artworks, accompanied by pedagogical and curatorial projects, maintain a rich dialogue between Chinese pictorial and literary traditions, contemporary art, philosophy and social engagement. Qiu’s work is expansive and absorbing, and the substantial scale and narrative richness of his creations is evident in his vast maps, which blend cartographic techniques from multiple disciplines, including geography, history, philosophy, mythology and science. He is also known for powerful sculptural installations that focus on the role of human ambition in China’s extraordinary process of modernisation.
Qiu Zhijie / China b.1969 / Map of Technological Ethics (detail) 2018, site-specific wall painting installed for APT9, GOMA, 2018 / Synthetic polymer paint / Commissioned for APT9 / © Qiu Zhijie
Qiu Zhijie’s enormous wall painting Map of Technological Ethics 2018 has its origins in Chinese ink painting and calligraphy. Painted directly on to the gallery wall over a period of five days, the map depicts an archipelago of moral quandaries in applied science. Islands and landmarks are named for activists and political lobbies, contentious issues in medicine and biology, and looming fears of technocracy and anthropogenic climate change.
At the same time, Qiu touches on the implications of artificial intelligence and computer technologies, from the impact of automation on labour to the use of facial recognition software in drone warfare. Assigning imagined geographies to a range of expressions of ethical anxiety throughout history and across cultures, Qiu suggests expanded possibilities for established categories of knowledge.
In the sheer scale and breadth of his map, he offers a graphical account of the potential for technology and its conundrums to pervade every aspect of human life. Map of Technological Ethics — rendered straight on the wall of GOMA for the duration of APT9 — is an expression of Qiu’s multi-disciplinary, trans-historical approach to art making, which teases open the social, moral and legal implications of scientific development.
