Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I have something to tell you about Qin Qi, this painter who escapes you so much. If you thought you could understand contemporary Chinese art with your little Western reading grids, you are mistaken. Qin Qi is the very embodiment of this new generation of Chinese artists born in the 70s, who juggle codes, references, and techniques with disconcerting freedom.
Born in 1975 in Shaanxi Province, graduated from the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts where he now teaches, Qin Qi has freed himself from academic constraints to develop a unique pictorial universe. His trajectory is fascinating: starting from a juvenile narrative figuration in the early 2000s, he gradually turned towards an experimentation of the image in 2004, before exploring the consciousness of form and structure in painting. It was in 2010, with his emblematic exhibition “A chair can also save lives” at the Minsheng Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, that he established himself as a key figure in new Chinese painting.
What immediately strikes in Qin Qi’s work is this strange ability to create tensions between the familiar and the strange, between the everyday and the fantastic. His paintings are populated by animals, horses, cranes, white geese, still lifes, religious landscapes, and characters with distinctive professional attributes: lamas (Tibetan Buddhist monks), cooks, players… The artist draws from his immediate environment while infusing it with a fantasmagorical dimension that disconcerts the viewer.
This approach strongly reminds me of that of Giorgio de Chirico, this great master of pictorial mystery. Like Qin Qi, De Chirico excelled at making the familiar strange, transforming public squares or everyday objects into unsettling metaphysical theaters [1]. Both artists share this ability to suspend time, to create spaces where usual logic is subverted. Like the faceless mannequins that populate De Chirico’s canvases, Qin Qi’s characters, notably his cooks with indecipherable expressions or his lamas in conversation, seem to exist in a parallel dimension, out of time, prisoners of an eternal instant.
“Metaphysical art must have the clarity and precision of an architectural plan,” wrote De Chirico [2]. This formal rigor, which does not exclude mystery, is found in the meticulous construction of Qin Qi’s compositions. Look at “The two lamas” or “The three lamas”: the Chinese artist organizes his space with troubling precision, each element, clouds, Buddhist statuettes, distant mountains, participating in the creation of a coherent but disturbing visual architecture.
But where De Chirico turned towards ancient Greece and Mediterranean mythology, Qin Qi appropriates the codes of Orientalism, which leads us to a second fascinating parallel with the painting of Edward Said and his critique of Orientalism. Said brilliantly demonstrated how the West constructed a fantasized vision of the Orient that served its own colonial interests and mythology [3]. What is savory in Qin Qi’s approach is that he turns this mechanism on its head: as a Chinese artist, he seizes Orientalist cliches to distort them and make them the support of a personal reflection.
Take “Ali Baba”, this stunning work where he represents Jack Ma (the founder of Alibaba) as an Arab merchant crossing the desert. Qin Qi plays with Orientalist stereotypes, not to perpetuate them, but to create a contemporary allegory that questions the new digital silk roads. As Said wrote, “the Orient has almost been an invention of Europe” [4], and here is a Chinese artist reappropriating this invention to tell an unprecedented story, that of contemporary China extending its economic influence to the west.
This approach eerily echoes the concept of reverse Orientalism that Said evoked: “Representations of the Orient by the West reflect less the Oriental reality than they serve to define Western identity by contrast” [5]. Qin Qi operates a similar reversal, using Orientalist imagery not to define the other, but to explore his own hybrid cultural identity, that of a Chinese artist nourished as much by local tradition as by Western art history.
The work “Paradise” (2017) is the perfect illustration of this: this utopian vision of a world where men and animals coexist harmoniously borrows as much from dynamic Western compositions as from a certain idea of Buddhist paradise. But it is a self-aware utopia, tinged with postmodern irony, Qin Qi knows full well that these idyllic representations are cultural constructions, and that is precisely what interests him.
The evolution of Qin Qi’s pictorial technique is particularly interesting. Between 2007 and 2008, he developed what critics have called his “thickening” period, where the thick materiality of the paint becomes almost sculptural. This tactile approach is not unlike certain paintings by Van Gogh, with this fundamental difference that Qin Qi uses it to deconstruct the image rather than to express intense subjective emotion. The materiality of the paint becomes for him a means of resistance against the hegemony of the photographic image, so prevalent in contemporary visual culture.
From 2012, his style evolved radically. As the critic Zhang Li explains, “breaking away from his previous period, Qin Qi first drew a series of landscapes to express objects through their outlines, then gradually moved from the complex to the simple” [6]. This simplification is not a regression, but a refinement. The artist introduces cubist elements into his work, considering that “cubism is still classical, it is the last effort of art history in terms of modeling” [7].
What is interesting is that Qin Qi does not use historical styles as mere quotations. He digests them, transforms them, adapts them to his own expressive needs. Unlike so many contemporary artists who practice a sterile art of reference, Qin Qi operates a true alchemical transmutation of influences. As Edward Said wrote about true cultural innovators, “their genius has consisted in reworking and reshaping what history had given them” [8].
Qin Qi’s chromatic palette also testifies to this transformative approach. His vivid, sometimes garish tones are not unlike German Expressionism, but they are used to explore the possibilities of color in a deeply personal way. In his recent paintings such as “The Rain” (2016) or “The Monk” (2016), the apparently arbitrary colors create a parallel universe where the laws of physics seem suspended.
Qin Qi’s pictorial universe is also populated by recurrent figures that act as obsessive leitmotifs. The white goose, for example, appears in many works, “Great white goose”, “White goose”, “Thinking goose”, “Cook and white goose”. Initially a simple “still life” destined to be cooked, the animal gradually acquires a symbolic, sometimes even anthropomorphic dimension. This progressive metamorphosis of a banal motif into a complex symbol testifies to the conceptual depth of Qin Qi’s work.
Similarly, his numerous portraits of cooks, created since 2011, constitute a subtle reflection on social hierarchies and class structures. These ordinary figures, dressed in their white uniforms, evoke the era of the Chinese planned economy while raising universal questions about the relationship between social identity and individual identity. As Said wrote, “human identity is not only natural and stable, but constructed, even sometimes invented out of whole cloth” [9].
What I like about Qin Qi is that he navigates between different stylistic registers without ever losing himself. Where so many contemporary artists confuse eclecticism with inconsistency, Qin Qi manages to maintain a deep coherence through his formal explorations. This approach is not unlike the metaphysical conception of art defended by De Chirico: “The revelation of a work of art, the conception of a painting or any other work of art is the same thing as the discovery of a new and eternal aspect of reality” [10].
What distinguishes Qin Qi from so many other artists of his generation is that he creates an autonomous creative system that absorbs and transforms influences without submitting to them. As the critic Lu Mingjun explains, “Qin Qi’s practice is a practice of knowledge of art history and pictorial language itself” [11]. Through this practice, the artist manages to create what De Chirico called “a new feeling that no one had ever felt before us” [12].
At a time when so many contemporary artists are content to recycle the trends of the moment, Qin Qi offers us a singular vision, anchored in a deep knowledge of art history while resolutely turned towards the future. He embodies this living paradox of an artist who draws from the most diverse traditions to create an absolutely personal work.
So, you bunch of snobs, the next time you come across a canvas by Qin Qi, take the time to linger. Behind the apparent strangeness, behind the shimmering colors and the bizarreness of the compositions, hides a profound reflection on what it means to paint today, at the intersection of cultures and traditions. Qin Qi offers us a masterful lesson: true art does not consist in reproducing the visible, but in making visible, as Paul Klee said, what is not yet.
- De Chirico, Giorgio. “Meditations of a painter”, in Writings, Paris, Flammarion, 1983.
- De Chirico, Giorgio. “On metaphysical art”, in Valori Plastici, April-May 1919.
- Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Paris, Seuil, 1980.
- Ibid.
- Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism, Paris, Fayard, 2000.
- Zhang Li. “The reasons and stages of Qin Qi’s works”, article published in 2014.
- Ibid.
- Said, Edward. Intellectuals and Power, Paris, Seuil, 1996,.
- Said, Edward. Orientalism, op. cit..
- De Chirico, Giorgio. “Meditations of a painter”, op. cit.
- Lu Mingjun. “The suspension of objects, images and concepts”, article published in 2017.
- De Chirico, Giorgio. “Some perspectives on my art”, in Valori Plastici, May 1920.
