Qiu Zhijie: Solo exhibition

Tessa Giblin curated the first major exhibition in the UK of Qiu Zhijie's (b. 1969, Zhangzhou, China) work. This exhibition captured the timeliness of his work, speaking to the rapidly developing, fractious geopolitical landscape and a return to chilling relations between centres of power, underpinned by the unsustainable dependence on the extraction and distribution of resources. Against this backdrop, his sprawling maps, infused with logical indicators of topography as well as illogical projections of fantasy, surreal linguistic play, and philosophical provocations, represented an entangled, complicated, contradictory world which, for all its diversity, was also inseparably co-dependent.

Qiu Zhijie’s practice embraces calligraphy, poetry, teaching, criticism, and curating, and as a thinker and cartographer, he has earned worldwide critical recognition for his concept and practice of ‘total art’. Through this approach, he brings together different cultures and knowledge systems to propose alternative worldviews.