The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

165 There is an animal on this mountain which looks like a horse, but it has a white head and stripes like a tiger, and a scarlet tail . . . There is a bird on this mountain that looks like a chicken, but it has three heads, six eyes, six feet, and three wings . . . There is an animal on this mountain that looks like a fox, but it has nine tails. It makes a noise like a baby. It can devour humans . . . 1 In the immediacy and transience of contemporary life, it seems improbable that a book about strange places, and even stranger animals, has the power to survive some 2000 years. Yet, this is the case for Shan Hai Jing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas) , an ancient work of Chinese geography and mythology. The text is no less than an attempt to ‘provide a comprehensive survey of the whole world’ 2 — some 400 Chinese mountains and rivers (and corresponding plant and animal life) are explored, as well as the regions beyond. China’s many fanciful, mythological creatures have inspired artists throughout the ages, and Qiu Anxiong’s The new book of mountains and seas 2006–09 continues in this vein, though more as a contemporary reinvention than as an illustrative response. Like its centuries-old counterpart, Qiu’s hour-long, painstakingly handpainted animation — which is produced from some 6000 individual ink drawings — is a disconcerting mix of the everyday and the impossible. It is dreamily symbolic and, as in a lucid dream, we are protected from the tragic absurdities of the modern world it presents: environmental degradation and self-annihilating warfare in the first part and, in the second, mad cow disease, human organ farming, industrialised animal farming, and China’s controversial damming of the Yangtze River. Qiu’s fragmented and often beautiful imagery records the visions of an interested but objective third party; possibly a visitor from the past. Such a person would likely conceptualise modern machines as the strange hybrids depicted here: tank-like elephants with buffalo bodies, submarines come to life as bizarre whales, and galactic unicorns with satellite-dish heads. (The exception is the rat with the human ear growing on its back — a modern-day reality that would be equally at home as one of Shang Hai Jing ’s impossible creatures.) Curator Chang Tsong-zung writes of this sense of distance as a perspective Qiu has reached by ‘stretching his vision into the horizon, where all the world’s dramas are but distant tremors, and all human strife are inconsequential disputes within the greater order of the universe’. 3 The artist haunts us, rather than confronts us, with the evidence of our failings, frailties and oddities. Qiu Anxiong and contemporaries such as Yang Fudong are part of a growing number of Chinese artists looking to their cultural past to make sense of the modern world and their place in it. Reflecting on his experience of living and studying outside China, 4 Qiu said that: ‘The best thing I could do to keep my own identity was to begin reading [revered Buddhist teacher] Nan Huaijin’s books and learn Qiu Anxiong The new book of mountains and seas traditional things’. 5 The new book of mountains and seas is a powerful representation of the meeting of old and new in Qiu’s practice, which also encompasses large-scale sculpture. The much-lauded debut of part one of the work at the 2006 Shanghai Biennale announced Qiu Anxiong as an artist with a richly lyrical vision — a vision that continues to unfold across the world art stage, not unlike the wings of one of his strange, beguiling creatures. Sarah Stutchbury Endnotes 1 Anne Birrell, ‘Introduction’, in Anonymous, The Classic of Mountains and Seas , trans. Anne Birrell, Penguin, London, 1999, pp.3–4. 2 Anonymous, p.xvi. 3 Chang Tsong-zung, ‘The world seen from afar’, in Qiu Anxiong: The New Sutra of Mountains and the Seas [exhibition catalogue], Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, 2007, unpaginated. 4 Qiu Anxiong studied at Germany’s University of Kassel in the early 2000s. 5 Maggie Ma, ‘Biennale wonder boy: Qiu Anxiong’, <http://www.artzinechina.com/ display_vol_aid198_en.html>, viewed 26 July 2009.