Detail: The 11 paintings in this exhibition have a production period from 2005-2014 and represent the most recent iterations of Qiu’s breakthrough style of “fissuring,” in which he paints and tears Xuan rice paper, rearranging and mounting the paper fragments on a base layer in cracked compositions. This theme is intensely personal to the artist, who endured political persecution for his seminal role in the 1979 organization of the Caocao (Grass) Group of Chinese painters, one of China’s first experimental art societies. As the group’s primary leader, Qiu was subjected to public and private criticism and enormous political pressure. It was in 1982, at the height of this political conflict and shortly after the artist was exposed to the work of Jackson Pollock in a revolutionary exhibition of Western abstract art, that Qiu was struck by the cracks in the pavement he walked on. His feelings of subjugation and personal destruction seemed to crystalize in the deteriorating pavement, but there was relief to be found in this breakdown as well; he sensed it indicated new opportunities and the beginning of an alternative for himself and his work.

Since then, Qiu threw himself into experimenting with techniques and materials that would allow him to render the organic, freeform lines of a fissure, which had encapsulated both aesthetic and philosophical meaning for the artist. It is the work from that period forward that has defined Qiu’s career, and which he has used henceforth to investigate new possibilities within the medium of ink painting to not only to create visual imagery, but also to offer insights about the shifting role of art in contemporary China and the world around.