The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

137 ARTISTS Map of Utopia – People who claimed to be messiah crowded history 2015 Ink on paper / 245 x 126cm / Image courtesy: The artist qiu zhijie Born 1969, Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, China Lives and works in Beijing, China With its origins in calligraphy, Qiu Zhijie’s practice has evolved over many years to arrive at a method the artist calls ‘Total Art’. His thinking maintains a rich dialogue between Chinese pictorial and literary traditions, contemporary art, art theory and social engagement, and encompasses pedagogical, curatorial and publishing projects. Qiu’s enormous wall painting Map of Technological Ethics 2018 is an expression of Total Art’s multidisciplinary, trans-historical approach, as applied to the social, moral and legal implications of scientific development. As a student of calligraphy, Chinese classics and European philosophy, Qiu distinguished himself in the 1990s through a series of visually striking, conceptually oriented photographic and video works. He is also known for organising a number of provocative exhibitions, including 1999’s influential ‘Post- Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies and Delusion’. 1 In the 2000s, he produced several volumes of art theory, was curator of the Long March Project, 2 and established innovative teaching workshops at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he is Dean of Experimental Art. Throughout this period, he has pursued a vigorous, hands-on artistic practice. Maps have been central to Qiu’s approach to art in recent years, beginning, characteristically, with his Map of Total Art 2012. Here, Total Art was depicted as a city with major thoroughfares — avenues of ‘Reality’, ‘History’, ‘Creation’, ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Modernity’ and ‘Everyday Life’ — leading to a central ‘Spiritual Freedom Circus’ and skirting a ‘Lake of Absolute Freedom’. The maps have since grown in scale and subject matter, from utopian societies to a history of contemporary art in China. Rendered in brush and ink, Qiu’s maps evoke a history of Chinese map-making extending back to the beginning of the Warring States Period in the fifth century BCE. They also find stylistic touchstones in pre-modern European cartography — maps that were made prior to the imposition of an enlightenment rationality that sought less to represent space than to illustrate principles. The more functional maps of the Age of Exploration still included oceans, ships and sea monsters, while the allegorical geography of the seventeenth-century French aristocracy produced such classic works as the Carte de Tendre , Madeleine de Scudéry’s guide to an imaginary land of emotions. Depicting an archipelago of moral quandaries, Qiu’s Map of Technological Ethics was first produced in ink on paper and later expanded to a wall painting. Biological questions figure prominently, with landmarks named for such contentious issues as abortion, euthanasia and genetic identification cards, surrounded by a Sea of Risk. Dolly, the famous cloned sheep, is afforded her own lake on the Island of Bioethics. Activist and political protagonists figure, including professional lobbyists, animal liberationists and the environmental movement, as do looming fears at a society- wide or planetary scale, like 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. Even classics of speculative fiction — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1818 and Brave New World , Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopia of genetic manipulation — are represented. Assigning imagined geographies to a range of expressions of ethical anxiety throughout history and across cultures, Qiu Zhijie suggests expanded possibilities for established categories of knowledge. In the sheer interdisciplinary character of his map, he offers a graphical account of the potential for technology and its conundrums to pervade every aspect of human life. Reuben Keehan Endnotes 1 Organised with curator Wu Meichun, the exhibition was held in the basement of a Beijing apartment block and marked a departure from the Cynical Realism and Political Pop art that dominated Chinese art in the 1990s. 2 The Long March Project is an experimental initiative retracing the path of the Chinese Red Army’s historical retreat and consolidation; see Long March Project , <http://longmarchproject.com/ >, viewed June 2018.