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Qiu Anxiong

Qiu Anxiong was born in 1972 in Sichuan province, China. He graduated from Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1994. Later, in 2003, he graduated from the University Kassel's College of Art in Germany after six years of studying both contemporary international art and traditional Chinese culture. Now an important figure in Chinese video art, Qiu teaches art and animation at East China Normal University.

Artwork

Qiu Anxiong adopted the medium of animation at Kassel University, which was also where he was exposed to Western modernism. His animations are made by painting monochrome acrylics directly onto canvases, then wiping and modifying the canvas for the next frame. Each animation involves thousands of paintings. This technique captures many elements of Chinese landscape painting. Qiu collaborates with composers and musicians to create the soundtracks to his films. Qiu’s work is rooted in a critique of modernization, which tears apart social fabric under the justification of progress. Qiu is pessimistic regarding industrialization, and believes that certain values are disappearing from contemporary Chinese society. His films involve an investigation of dystopian paradox, exposing hierarchies of verticality and technological control that exist in contemporary cities. Qiu’s Buddhist practice is important to his work—it fuels his meditative, humanistic perspective.

New Classic of Mountains and Seas Qiu’s series “New Classic of Mountains and Seas” is inspired by the ancient cosmography “Classic of Mountains and Seas,” which describes various fantastical creatures. In “New Classic of Mountains and Seas,” which he has worked on for twelve years, Qiu presents contemporary machines and weapons as these creatures, eschewing naturalism for a perspective that engages more closely with industrial realities; thus reconciling the organic with the artificial. The series includes twelve woodblock prints and three animated videos, populated by hybridized industrial creatures like elephant tanks, lobster VR glasses, and octopus masks, creating a chaotic, dystopic world. d	Museum of the Unknown

Qiu founded the artist collective Museum of the Unknown in 2007. The collective, a crossover between mainstream art exhibition and socially concerned installation, 15-20 artists work in the collective at a time, free to drop in and out. In his presentation at Asia Art Archive in America on December 13 2013, Qiu said of the collective: “The Museum of Unknown was initiated in 2007 by me and a group of young artists. The backdrop at the time was the art market rocketing in China. As a result, most of the market attention was fixated on a very small and limited art circle, while at the same time a lot of cultural activities became invisible and very few tried to connect with other areas or disciplines. Therefore the initial proposal for Museum of Unknown was to make a platform for dialogue and collaboration across different disciplines, including the arts, sociology, science, architecture, and other things.”