Chambers Fine Art New York is pleased to announce the opening on March 5, 2009 of Mochou by Qiu Zhijie, his second exhibition at the gallery following The Shape of Time: Light Calli-photography by Qiu Zhijie in 2006. The new series of ink drawings on paper are associated with the artist’s ongoing investigation of the history of Nanjing and in particular the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, inaugurated in 1968 and regarded as a great triumph of Chinese power and resourcefulness.

In recent years Qiu Zhijie has been focusing on projects that require extensive travel and documentation in association with the production of works of art in a variety of media. Beginning with his association with the first phase of the Long March Project, continuing with his epic journey from Lhasa to Khatmandu in the footsteps of Nain Singh and now with his deep involvement with the city of Nanjing, Qiu Zhijie has embarked on an ambitious cultural voyage, investigating aspects of Chinese history and culture as they impinge on life today. Most ambitious by far is A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, the title for an ongoing project involving documentation, research and social activism (in this case, working with a suicide-prevention squad) in association with the production of works of art in many media.

Mochou is affiliated with Qiu Zhijie’s gesamtkunstwerk though in an indirect way. His association with Nanjing began in 2005 when he curated Archaeology of the Future, the second Nanjing Triennial. From the second half of 2007, he began to focus on the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge and in particular the relationship between this potent symbol and the high rate of suicides that occur there.

Research and documentation led to a wide range of artistic productions, including a group of editioned prints and unique works on paper made at Singapore Tyler Print Institute and an installation and a series of large works on paper exhibited at Chambers Fine Art Beijing last year.. Loosely connected with this constantly evolving and progressively more complex project are works that respond in a poetic and allusive way to legends associated with Nanjing and traditional Chinese themes.

Among these is the legend of Mochou, a young girl who lived in the Qin Dynasty, who was so poor that she had to sell herself to pay for her father’s funeral. Deeply unhappy in her marriage, she committed suicide in the lake that now bears her name and is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Nanjing. The oblique approach Qiu Zhijie adopted for the treatment of the Mochou theme in the Beijing installation was developed in the remarkable series of ink paintings exhibited in Beijing and New York that mostly depart from familiar Chinese sayings and proverbs. Working in an almost trance-like state and using every graphic and painterly means at his disposal, Qiu Zhijie finds visual equivalents for all the elements in these frequently cryptic sayings. Having established his reputation as one of the leading experimental artists in China in the last fifteen years, Qiu Zhijie has returned to the most traditional of all Chinese media while introducing an unprecedented and frequently unsettling thematic content. By focusing on the bridge which is such a potent symbol of China’s emerging power and related themes from China’s past such as Mochou and related themes, Qiu Zhijie explores themes such as time, memory and destiny, issues that have always been central to his interests in whatever medium he worked.