Tomorrow, things will be different Qiu Zhijie’s concept of keeping alive life through art

Abstract

The paper examines Qiu Zhijie’s multi-layered project A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge (since 2008) and asks what is at stake when art literally and metaphorically is assigned with life-saving functions. Based on the artist’s assumption that today’s social and political reality as well as its subjects are historically constructed the article conceives of the Nanjing Bridge as an embodiment of a historically constituted contemporary Chinese reality. Through close readings of the works as well as analyses of theoretical writings by Qiu Zhijie the article scrutinises the relationship Total Art assumes between the social and the aesthetic realm and examines the premises and strategies the artist adopts in order to produce socially and aesthetically effective art that keeps ‘alive’.

Keywords:

• Constructedness
• emancipation
• freedom
• interrelation
• self-cultivation
• transformation

Notes

1. I have written on this issue in greater detail in Hopfener (in press).

2. The Nanjing River Yangtze Bridge is one of the most famous national symbols of the Peoples Republic of China. Built during the Cultural Revolution without the help of foreign expertise it became a representation for a successful and glorious Socialist Future. During the times of Mao Zedong the Nanjing Bridge was omnipresent in the official visual culture in China for example on official documents such as diploma certificates or stamps and has influenced of how people constituted themselves as being part of a specific political and social reality. More recently, the Nanjing Bridge has become infamous as a site for a large number of suicides. As Zhu Zhu has written it is obvious that ‘these suicides form a micro-history that stands in sharp contrast to the official narrative of increasing prosperity and progressive socialism’ (Zhu, 2011).

3. ‘Qiu defines total art as an artistic practice based on cultural research, which turns to specific sociocultural events as catalysts for art-making, with the intent of proactively affecting viewers’ daily lives. This total art aspires to create efficacious art actions that challenge biased mainstream values in order to offer new perspectives on life. Thus, as Qiu asserts, the live site for his total art is history in the making’ (Cheng, 2009).

4. There are concepts of self-cultivation to be found in different worldviews in China. Qiu Zhijie is mainly referring to (Neo-) Confucian but also to Buddhist and Daoist concepts of self-cultivation. See my article: Hopfener (2015).

5. I have written on Qiu Zhijie’s concept of self-cultivation in Hopfener (2015).

6. I have written on this issue in greater detail in Hopfener (in press).

7. As Qiu Zhijie has repeatedly formulated in his writings and also visualised in the Map of Total Art (2012) ‘freedom’ is the aim of Total Art. Based on the persuasion that different from the traditional understanding, not the moral and metaphysical principle of li, but freedom is innate and potentially present in every human being Qiu Zhijie argues it is through Total Art, conceptualised as a contemporary critical practice of self-cultivation different from the traditional function of self-cultivation, not integration, but freedom and emancipation is achieved. See: Qiu (2006a, 2006b).

8. I have written on this issue in greater detail in Hopfener (in press).

9. I have written on this issue in greater detail in Hopfener (in press).

10. Moreover he also invited people to engage in copying calligraphies by the renowned educationist of Republican China Tao Xingzhi (1891–1946) such as ‘Think and think die no gain’, meaning ‘Better think twice before you commit suicide, for there is no gain in dying’ and writings such as ‚Rice must be eaten; Tears must be shed’ by Li Si, the initiator of the NGO ‘Soul Inn’ (Cheng, 2009, p. 21).

11. Moreover he also invited people to engage in copying calligraphies by the renowned educationist of Republican China Tao Xingzhi (1891–1946) such as ‘Think and think die no gain’, meaning ‘Better think twice before you commit suicide, for there is no gain in dying’ and writings such as ‚Rice must be eaten; Tears must be shed’ by Li Si, the initiator of the NGO ‘Soul Inn’ (Cheng, 2009, p. 21).

12. I have written on this issue in greater detail in Hopfener (in press).

13. I have published on this issue in Hopfener (2015).

14. Qiu’s bridge also includes verisimilar artefacts from the Nanjing Bridge: a series of decorative carvings created during the height of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Qiu and his student team painstakingly did rubbings of these carvings on the actual bridge in order to reproduce the panels as coal plates (Cheng, 2009, p. 21).

15. ‘The reliefs show the achievements made by the socialist construction during that period, such as the ten representative buildings in Beijing, East Wind, a liner of ten thousand tons, and the Qinghai-Tibet and Sichuan-Tibet railways. These reliefs and the sculptures entitled People erected at the bridgehead were created by, and were widely considered as he best sculptures in China at that time. See Qiu (2008b).

16. Water-Dragon Chant by Xin Qiji, Translation by Xu Yuan Zhong.

The southern sky for miles and miles in autumn dye.

And boundless autumn water spread to meet the sky,.

I gaze far.off northern hills.

Like spiral shells or hair décor of jade,.

Which grief or hatred overfills.

Leaning at sunset on balustrade.

And hearing a lonely swan’s song,.

A wanderer on southern land,.

I look at my precious sword long.

And pound all the railings with my hand,.

But nobody knows why.

I climb the tower high.

Don’t say for food.

The perch is good!.

When west winds blow,.

Why don’t I homeward go?I’d be ashamed to see the patriot,.

Should I retire to seek for land and cot.

I sigh for passing years I can’t retain;.

I driving wind and blinding rain.

Even an old tree grieves.

To whom then may I say.

To wipe my tears away.

With her pink handkerchief or her green sleeves.

(Zhong, 1994, p. 250).

17. ‘At the age of twenty-two the poet fought against the Jurchen invaders overrunning his native land in the north. Going to the south in 1167, her served as a petty official in Jiankang (presentday Nanjing). One autumn day, ascending Riverside Tower on the Western City Gate and seeing the hills on the northern shore, he sighed, for he could not wield his sword to fight against the foe and recapture the lost land in the north’. See Zhong (1994), p. 250.

18. ‘As if to match Li’s philosophical equanimity with a positive action, Qiu makes his bridge rails such that they cannot be leaned on, heavily coated as they are with pungent-smelling coal and safeguarded by the myriad mythic crows’ (Cheng, 2009, pp. 19–29).

19. Buddhist connotation: In a reading of the intervention Where is the capital of Madagascar? through a Buddhist lens, which seems legitimate or even demanded by the work itself since writing with blood as well as formulating a seemingly nonsense Koan-like question Where is the capital of Madagascar? can both be understood as references to Buddhism.

20. In order to emphasise the logic of interrelatedness Qiu Zhijie has coined the alternative Chinese name Guantong Yishu for Total Art. Guantong [贯通], which means ‘comprehensive understanding’, has been a central term in Chinese cultural histories of learning and apprehending the world. Literally translated guantong has the meaning of ‘ the thread that runs through things’, which as a metaphor according to Antonio S. Cua ‘(…) intimates the idea that understanding consists in having an insight into the interconnection of all things’. It is in this regard that guantong does not in the first place mean understanding a specific content, but instead achieving insights into interconnections (Cua, 2005, p. 164). Total Art appropriates the guantong-premises of interconnectedness and comprehensive understanding, but turns guantong’s traditional unifying and integrative into a critical function. As will be explained ‘comprehensive understanding’ is conceptualised as a critical and interdisciplinary approach, that aims at opening new perspectives achieved through an interrelational interventionist practice of self-cultivation. About this issue see my article: Hopfener (in press).

21. ‘In Archive, we encounter a stupendous collection of historical documents and objects excavated from the past four decades, ever since the Nanjing Bridge’s opening in 1968. These miscellaneous items—all imprinted with information, insignias, icons, or stylized renditions of the Nanjing Bridge—attest to the power and prevalence of the propaganda machine’ (Cheng, 2009, p. 21).

22. ‘The exhibition space in Zendai MoMA is divided into four display sections, identified as Archive; Clinic; Think Tank; and Crystalloid. Among its four parts, both Archive and Clinic have clear focuses: the former deals with the political significance of the Nanjing Bridge in China’s revolutionary history; the latter with the aftermath that continues to this day. In contrast, the other two parts—Think Tank and Crystalloid—are much more multivalent, dense with allusions and implications’ (Cheng, 2009).

23. Although the exhibition is laid out along four conceptual vectors, the artist presents the four parts as interdependent components of a whole by mixing up their territories with cross-references’ (Cheng, 2009, p. 23).

24. 庸俗社会学 (Yongsu shehuixue) (Qiu, 2012, p. 211).