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Bulletin: Qiu Xiaofei
A closer look inside Qiu Xiaofei’s Beijing studio
For our latest installment of Bulletin—Ursula’s recurring feature that focuses on artists’ bulletin boards, the casual image banks they assemble for inspiration—we visited the artist Qiu Xiaofei in his Beijing studio.
Le Corbusier once described La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland—where he was born and raised—as “a leprous spot in an otherwise continuous landscape… but a breath of living idealism passes through it, giving us hope.” I return to this often: something blemished can still stand.
In 2018, during the last months of my father’s life, he and my mother lived in a hospital on the outskirts of Beijing, in two connecting north-facing rooms. Outside the window lay a swamp-like construction site; in the distance stretched the rolling Mangshan mountains. From the window, time seemed to move in reverse—to see towering buildings was to recall, within a dying man, his childhood.
Constructed spaces resemble an interior life. One does not begin from wholeness but from fragments that suggest how a structure might be built. In my studio, I keep a wall of many images—family photographs, sketches, landscapes, postcards. They do not belong to a single order, yet arranged in this way, they begin to take shape.—Xiaofei
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“Qiu Xiaofei: The Theater of Wither and Thrive” remains on view at Hauser & Wirth New York 22nd Street through April 18.
Qiu Xiaofei lives and works in Beijing. He graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, in 2002 and came to prominence in the early 2000s as part of a new generation of artists shaping China’s contemporary art scene.