It uses the method of “map” to connect and explain the various relationships between symbolization and individual identity in the current field of online cultural communication.
——How in Project 6
About Mapper
Qiu Zhijie (邱志杰; born 1969) is a contemporary Chinese artist who works primarily in video and photography. Overall, Qiu’s work suggests the struggle between the forces of destiny and self-assertion. Other common themes are social fragmentation and transience.
Since 2012, Qiu Zhijie has used maps as a method of work, “a way of unifying research, writing, fantasy and action scripts”. He began to try to use maps to condense his imagination and understanding of everything in the world. The “map maker” allowed him to find his true identity beyond the socially defined role.
The following is the interview, in which the method of “map” is explained in detail:
◎Liu Yuan: We understand that you have an interesting position about yourself. Since 2010, after you started creating maps, you defined yourself as a “mapper”.
In your own words, a “map maker” combines your many identities as artist, educator, researcher, writer, and calligrapher.
Can you explain to us why you define yourself as a “mapper”? How does being a “map maker” reflect your artistic philosophy and your perspective on understanding and seeing the world?
● Qiu Zhijie: Of course there are elements of jokes, but also elements of sincerity. Even as an artist, I am a diverse artist.
On the one hand, I am working on the most cutting-edge technologies. For example, I am now using artificial intelligence to make new materials.
On the other hand, when I was promoting the development of media art, I also painted ink paintings and created calligraphy works.
At the same time, in the group of artists, there are also artists within the system and outside the system, from the south and the north, and I am usually in the middle (In Between).
◎Liu Yuan: We understand that you have an interesting position about yourself. Since 2010, after you started creating maps, you defined yourself as a “mapper”.
In your own words, a “map maker” combines your many identities as artist, educator, researcher, writer, and calligrapher.
Can you explain to us why you define yourself as a “mapper”? How does being a “map maker” reflect your artistic philosophy and your perspective on understanding and seeing the world?
● Qiu Zhijie: Of course there are elements of jokes, but also elements of sincerity. Even as an artist, I am a diverse artist.
On the one hand, I am working on the most cutting-edge technologies. For example, I am now using artificial intelligence to make new materials.
On the other hand, when I was promoting the development of media art, I also painted ink paintings and created calligraphy works.
At the same time, in the group of artists, there are also artists within the system and outside the system, from the south and the north, and I am usually in the middle (In Between).
A “map maker” is a cartographer who works hard under the blue light, or an ascetic or copyist in a monastery, who seems very low-key.
But at the same time, the mappers were very proud. We can say that Deng Xiaoping is the “painter” or chief architect of China’s reform and opening up, because he is the one who sketches the world, and he is the one who interprets the world as an image.
In fact, the artist is to bring things that are already commonplace in our daily life into a new relationship. In this new relationship, a new understanding of the world emerges.
If I were to draw a map of the “traveler”, this map should have Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, Xuanzang, but there may also be a drifting bottle suddenly appearing in this map, and a kind of poetry will emerge from it.
Drawing a map is not only to understand the existing relationship between things, but also to reorganize the existing relationship, so that things can lead to some new possibilities.
A lot of the work I do is actually trying to break down the insurmountable gaps that people think are insurmountable, to build bridges between many fields, to find channels to connect them.
◎Liu Yuan: Looking at your map, I have two main feelings: On the one hand, in today’s era of fragmented information, it is very difficult to have a holistic vision. This means that you need to be able to see the whole from a height.
On the other hand, as you just mentioned about the structural relationship, this requires you to have a more precise grasp of the details, including a knowledge panorama of time, space, concepts, logic, history, geography and culture. Deep understanding, the establishment of this relationship, and even creative subversion, or reconstruction of a new relationship is possible.
These are also two of the things I find most exciting about your map series.