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Qiu Zhijie, 24 World Maps, 2015-2017

Chapter: Map of Utopia - History, Cartography, Worlds Design

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Conceptual art rooted in ancient traditions
Qiu Zhijie is a theorist, curator, and artist who works across a wide range of media. Today he is regarded as one of the major innovators in contemporary Chinese art. His conceptual and poetic works are infused with existential humor and contain philosophical reflections on art, culture, politics, and everyday life in the digital twenty-first century. At the same time, they are deeply rooted in ancient traditions such as ink painting and calligraphy, which he has practiced since childhood.

Everything is connected
In 2010, he began the project Mapping the World, a synthesis of research, writing, imagination, and action. In hundreds of maps created since then, Qiu uses ink and brush techniques derived from landscape painting to sketch a coordinate system that interweaves ideas, people, objects, and events, placing them in relation to one another. Through these cycles of maps, the artist presents a rational worldview in which, at least on the surface, everything appears relationally connected and representable. One aim of his work is to link art with life, society, and science.

Fictional maps
The four maps presented in the exhibition belong to Qiu’s 24-part World Maps cycle. Drawn in ink and watercolor on paper and consistently bilingual, written in both English and Chinese, each fictional map is dedicated to a specific theme, such as architecture, storytelling, games, art and everyday life, fate, human emotions, memory, or illness.

Imitation of life
Some maps also follow an internal, theme-specific logic in their landscape structures. The Map of Architecture resembles a city plan, while the Map of Body traces the outline of a human figure using river-like forms. Regarding his Map of Games, Qiu states: “It also includes casino, theater and computer games. Some games are for competition, and some are the copy of social life, such as chess. All chess games are imitation of war. And each of all these computer games, of course, is totally a war. Some game is linked to fate. All activities of gambling are related to destiny and fate.”

Trying anyway
Yet these works are also about losing. That is the meaning implied in the title Used to Being a Loser. Qiu’s ambition to map the “entire” inner and outer world, and our increasingly complex and opaque present, appears almost hopeless, like trying to sweep a beach clean. It is similarly sobering when he maps the cycle of revolutions or records, in his Map of Utopia, the multitude of individuals who have declared themselves messiahs throughout human history. In this sense, his monumental yet meticulously executed maps function as systems or models of thought that are conceptually destined to remain incomplete. The fact that he continues to attempt this is a central theme in Qiu’s art.

Audio

Note: The audio transcription is voiced by an AI.

Qiu Zhijie
Map of Games - Used to Being a Loser, 2015
Map of Art and Everyday Life - The Poets Even Been Driven Out of the Republic by Plato, 2015
Map of Utopia - People Claimed to Be Messiah Crowding History, 2015
From the series 24 World Maps, 2015-2017
Indian ink on paper in canvas
© Qiu Zhijie
Written Art Collection

Further artworks from this exhibition