Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. While you strut around at your openings, sipping lukewarm champagne, there exists an artist who has chosen to bury himself in his studio for an entire decade. Qiu Ruixiang, born in 1980 in Shaanxi, is not one to seek approval or conform to the dictates of the contemporary art market.
In a world where artists exhaust themselves cultivating their image on social media, Qiu made the radical choice of isolation. From 2003 to 2013, he cloistered himself in his studio in Xi’an, painting day after day, year after year, like a Zen monk who traded sutras for brushes. This voluntary retreat is reminiscent of Heidegger’s conception of art as a site of truth’s unveiling. For Heidegger, a work of art is not merely an aesthetic object but an event in which truth comes into being. Qiu embodies this quest for truth through his ascetic practice, far from the spotlight and the noise of the art world.
His canvases are inhabited by solitary figures, often male, bearing invisible burdens in confined and dark spaces. These silhouettes evoke the myth of Sisyphus as reinterpreted by Albert Camus. Yet where Camus saw a form of joyful rebellion in Sisyphus’s repetitive labor, Qiu’s figures seem trapped in profound melancholy, as if carrying the weight of existence itself. Walter Benjamin spoke of the aura of a work of art as the unique appearance of a distance, no matter how close it may be. Qiu’s paintings possess that particular aura, a ghostly presence that reminds us of our own existential solitude.
The artist’s palette is as dark as the depths of the human psyche. His cold alizarin tones and thick grays create an oppressive atmosphere reminiscent of Goya’s “Black Paintings”. But unlike Goya, who depicted society’s demons, Qiu explores inner demons, those that inhabit us all but which we prefer to ignore. His figures, with distorted proportions and oversized hands and feet, reflect less an anatomical analysis than a dissection of the human soul.
This exploration of interiority resonates with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the phenomenology of perception. For the French philosopher, the body is not merely an object in space but the vehicle of our being-in-the-world. Qiu’s figures, in their exaggerated corporeality, embody the tension between being-in-the-world and the desire for withdrawal. Their posture, often bent under the weight of an invisible burden, expresses a form of passive resistance to the verticality imposed by modern society.
If some critics see his work as a regression to outdated expressionism, they miss the point. Qiu does not seek to align himself with any particular pictorial tradition or to revolutionize contemporary painting. His approach is more akin to that of an archaeologist of the human soul, digging ever deeper into the layers of our collective psyche. As Gaston Bachelard wrote in “The Poetics of Space”, “The poetic image is not subject to a push. It is not an echo of the past. Rather, the reverse is true: through the radiance of an image, the distant past resonates with echoes, and one can hardly tell at what depth these echoes will reverberate and fade”.
Qiu’s paintings resonate with precisely these echoes. His anonymous figures, trapped in claustrophobic spaces, mirror our own condition as beings imprisoned in the invisible structures of contemporary society. His stubborn refusal of art market codes, his voluntary isolation, his painterly technique that allows the paint to crack and flake—all these elements constitute a form of silent but relentless resistance to the commodification of art.
The very materiality of his works, with their thick impastos and tormented surfaces, attests to a physical struggle with the medium. Each canvas is the result of a hand-to-hand combat with the paint, recalling Georges Didi-Huberman’s reflections on the dialectic of images. For him, the image is not merely a representation but a battlefield where contradictory forces clash. Qiu’s paintings are exactly that: battlefields where light and darkness, presence and absence, gravity and levity collide.
You can continue to marvel at sanitized conceptual installations or meaningless performances. Meanwhile, in his studio in Xi’an, Qiu Ruixiang relentlessly explores the depths of the human soul, creating works that, unlike so many others, will stand the test of time. Not because they are fashionable or meet market expectations, but precisely because they don’t care to. His authentic and profoundly personal approach is an act of resistance that commands respect.