Qiu Ruixiang
Karen Smith
Following his graduation (from Xi’an Academy of Fine Art) in 2003, Qiu Ruixiang spent the next ten years working unseen in his studio. For reasons that were both incidental and deliberate, for this artist, the first decade of the twenty-first century passed almost incommunicado. He saw few people, and spoke little of his art, even among friends, giving almost no one the occasion to see it. He just painted, and painted. Day after day, year after year.
As he endeavored to understand the essence of what he wanted to say, or what worked and what didn’t, his expression developed through a simple mode of comparison; by looking at one painting after another, identifying their flaws as well as the small successes. Through this incidental process, he learned how to improve his ideas, his manner of expression and technique; how to evolve what worked and, importantly, how to avoid what didn’t. One day after another, a new painting would follow on from a previous attempt, and he would go back and forth, checking his progress, observing, reflecting, thinking, studying, canvas by canvas, year after year, all achieved by the repeated action of doing, again and again.
That was Qiu Ruixiang’s daily routine when I first met him in 2013 in Xi’an, in the city where he lives and works. Although I was already working in Xi’an in preparation for the OCAT which opened there later that year, he was introduced to me by Sun Ning, then director of Platform China. Prompted by the recommendation of another artist who had chanced to see Qiu Ruixiang’s work, Sun Ning visited Xi’an to see for herself, promptly deciding to give him a show, which became “Portraits of Self”, held in 2014. This exhibition was followed at Platform China by a second solo presentation in 2017 titled “Rabbit, Den and Barn”.
From the first to the second, Qiu Ruixiang‘s work had already changed slightly. As he gained confidence with his language through the opportunity to show it in a public space, so the compositions and content of his paintings followed instincts that were at that point simply that, instincts, yet to become fully fleshed-out or formalized, with the result that the work had taken an abrupt step towards the personal, a dark, opaque intensity that was also somewhat abstract and hard to read. By 2018, when his presented his paintings at OCAT Xi’an in the solo presentation “Groping in the Dark”, the change had become more noticeable still. Placed together, the compositions now emanated a subtle and arresting power. The intimacy remained, but the general aura of Qiu Ruixiang’s work was now felt to be gaining clarity, consciously articulated, and, thus, was touching to those who saw them. Ever dark, the paintings were still both brooding and poignant, full of isolation and alienation, yet, at the same time, there was something about the figures, their stance, their mood, and their inward-focused expression – the awkward yet moving psychology that the figures and forms suggested – which was palpably universal, human, with which we could all identify.
However, through those several years, as Qiu Ruixiang’s work gained a modest degree of exposure, it was at the same time subject to a much more modest volume of discussion within the circles of contemporary art, largely because within those circles, and particularly among those members who express a preference for art that is more cutting-edge, painting has tends to be largely unfashionable. Qiu Ruixiang’s painting, with its innate darkness and attachment to a form of expressionistic figuration, perhaps more unfashionable than most. Conversely, and somewhat ironically, within the market-dominated mainstream artworld, painting continues to hold sway over what is praised and enjoyed as the height of contemporary practice. It is without doubt the preferred medium for a wide market among young collectors. Yet, even among this group, Qiu Ruixiang’s works did not find ready acceptance. This is certainly not because he is not a good painter. His painting style is rather unique, and not just for our time. One significant reason may be that the paintings don’t translate as images on social media which, for art right now, as for so much present-day life experience, is the biggest platform for circulation of information and reference. In reproduction and on a small scale, Qiu Ruixiang’s paintings are stripped of their texture and nuance, their depth and intellectual volume, rendered as vulnerable and lost as the figures he paints.
But while his preferred palette of tones tends towards dark – sometimes very dark, making for a sobriety that is not always easy on the eye or the senses – his content, what is it that he aims to convey, is approached with honesty, instincts that are unfettered by a conscious striving for this or that style, to dovetail with this or that trend. He neither clings to any traditional seam of painting history, nor creates with the goal of being ground-breaking. On the surface, nothing obvious about the figures he depicts places them in our time now – in fact, the garments in which they are attired are apt to infer a reference to historic, or folk costume. What makes the figures contemporary is their psychological state, which is the work’s most precious, perceptive and dynamic asset. Its exploration of base humanness, with all its fragility and ambiguity laid bare. This is its quality of timelessness. This body of painting is thus the singular expression of a genuinely dedicated artist. The viewer simply needs to look, to engage, and let their imagination/experience do the reading. The work remains nonetheless difficult to contextualise and explain.
Yet, to spend a short time really looking at the paintings is to be captivated by what they convey. To listen to Qiu Ruixiang speak of his concept is to realise how closely his experience translates into his work, how the figures capture his sense of the world and as a visual language. His paintings are a bridge between himself and the outside world, a negotiated tension between a desired state of openness and freedom, and the conflicting urge to contain, control and conceal what can’t be expressed.
Since the time of my first meeting with Qiu Ruixiang in 2013, almost another ten years has gone by; and, for the artist, almost a second decade of dedicated insular work alone in the studio with long stretches of isolation. Through regular visit to his studio, I have watched him work at close quarters. Little in his daily life or his daily routine has changed. He has become a father, which has given him a new perspective on life. This experience seems to have brought him to a clearer and more vocal sense of what he wants.
What is that? For Qiu Ruixiang, more than fifty per cent of what he does as a painter is to wrestle with the activity, the medium, that is painting; from its history, to its materiality, to the simple framework of what canvas and paint does as a two-dimensional space, as a material and picture plane. It is the challenge of dealing with the overwhelming accumulation of styles and imagery through history to the present. So much has been done already, what possibly can be left to do, or to say? How does a painter today get beyond this mountain, while remaining true to their own impulses?
Within those impulses Qiu Ruixiang does something very painterly, something very simple, that’s largely about painting itself; largely because he’s using paint, even as he works to transcend the weight of its tradition. In his works, the paint cracks with frustrating regularity, it flakes off and cannot be restored. Some compositions become too dark, or too shiny, or then again too matt. Yet, no matter how frustratingly hard to control, these issues do not inhibit him in the slightest. They certainly never deter him from pursuing the elusive thing that he knows he needs to express.
Most directly, that can be described as a desire to communicate a state, or various states, of being. There has been a shift in his use of colour towards darker shades and still richer gradations of darkness. There’s an on-going uncomfortable flirtation with pasty greys and cold alizarins, but Qiu Ruixiang sees these less in terms of colour per se and more of a tonality, as if he was painting in monochrome but in the key of alizarin. The figures he depicts have grown in surety and the aura of certitude they emanate, even where that confidence is tainted with frustration. The figures are increasingly structural. They have a sense of solidity or weight, of formlessness or being dragged down or hanging. They no longer need us to feel concerned for their physical well-being (as was the sense that emanated from figure paintings presented in his first exhibition at Platform China, “Portrait of Self” – but instead for their psychological welfare. They are not there to express anything in a temporal sense, they are about the ongoing essence of humanity, they are about the eternal weight/burden, struggles, ambitions, and occasional enlightenment, to which it is subject. Working with this minimal essence of the figure, perhaps in the way that Anthony Gormely tries to extract the essence of human weight, of human proportion through sculptural forms, Qiu Ruixiang is trying to capture the energy that courses through the body, that holds or weighs you down or, ideally, that lifts you up. He does this in ways that suggest positive energy as freedom of motion; and conditions of stasis as means of encasing the negative forces. These are the momentums that have been the core of his content, and that draft and direct the compositions over the last several years. In this sense, Qiu Ruixiang’s work speaks to us very clearly.