an astonishing patience and an insistence for absolute detail. In this society, where speed and quantity of production are the norm, the suggestion of “the man who comes from other mountains” shows us another way to manage time. Is it the beautiful environment of water and mountains of Swiss landscapes that have favoured this long maturation of the expression of his memories? Or, is it his sharp view of reality that made him choose the most authentic tools, paper and a pencil, to seize the time that flows by?

Qiu Jie was born in 1961 in Shanghai. Having grown up with his grandparents, at the age of seventeen and with one year advance, he entered the fine arts section of the Technical School of Light Industries of Shanghai. After graduating, he worked as a decorator during six years. In 1989, he pursued his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Geneva. The clash of cultures, the difficulty of the language, material worries and the feeling of solitude all stimulated his desire to express his feelings with the utmost clarity possible. His irrepressible need to communicate with the Swiss public pushed him to employ a realistic style to depict his vision of the world.

Qiu Jie has shared the same living conditions and the same political movements as other Chinese artists of his generation. Rather than holding a direct judgement on the past, he conceives reality as a canvas that endlessly weaves itself with a precise objectivity. It is as if he holds up a mirror that faithfully reflects time’s traces. In his very rigorous compositions, one feels a joy of work and of self-confidence.

His work is inseparable from Chinese history by the great attention it attests to its jolts. Sometimes, we advance against the stormy wave; sometimes we descend like a cliff that crumbles onto the ground. He has superimposed images of different eras that provoke a mind-blowing density and a temporal change of scene. This first mural drawing that he made in 1993, brings together a solid academic technique, the form of painted propaganda and the manner of Dazibao to tell a hybrid story of our society. Through his autobiographical works, in every fragment, we find a common life experience. This technique of composition, both concrete and abstract, seems obvious at first sight, but a closer look reveals nuances putting forth an unexpected form of irony.

These large drawings, which sometimes take a year to accomplish, are not drawn from a preliminary sketch. They take form as one digs through a tunnel. A stone or a clump of earth appear as one attempts to push forth in an infinite of developments. It is only towards the end that one manages to read the whole of his drawing. This ability to abstractly manage around a hundred images as in puzzle is purely magical. In his works, he has used a shifting perspective as opposed to a fixed point of view, he has used a source of lighting according to necessity instead of a fixed light source. Composition, like a good bottle of wine, is a long maturing of its life. His work draws inspiration from the heritage of the great Wutai period (907-960) in Chinese painting. The realism of Qiu Jie refers to the rules of the master of Chinese painting, Jin Hao. In his treatise on painting “Bi Fa Ji”, he recommends describing the real landscape as a way of translating the four forms of ideal beauty: “Beyond, extraordinary genius, a startling technique, an ingenious composition”. These four precepts constitute the perpetual path Qiu Jie’s work.

Victoria Lu
Excepted from Victoria Lu's 「The artistic life of Qiu Jie "The man who comes from other mountains"」