The Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Aktuell – Berlin is pleased to be able to present a solo museum exhibition by the Chinese artist Qiu Shihua in Europe for the first time. Qiu Shihua's oeuvre is presented using a selection of works that includes early works from the 1970s to recent works. The exhibition thus offers a representative overview of Qiu's work, whose work is without a doubt one of the outstanding artistic achievements of contemporary art.
At first glance, Qiu Shihua's works appear to be monochrome, almost white paintings. However, after looking for a longer period of time, spacious landscapes become visible in the picturesque areas, which, depending on how you look, become increasingly detailed or disappear again as a possible image. Only intensive viewing makes the complex visibility of the images possible. In addition to seeing, the “thinking eye” is required, as only happens in a few cases in recent art history.
With the white landscapes, the artist questions the concept of visibility in painting. The artist allows his motifs to appear and disappear again in and behind thin, white layers of paint and glazes. The constant testing of the white landscape image type and the tireless preoccupation with the nuances of its changeability point to a Taoist way of thinking and working. It is characterized by the process of repetition, in which an interplay of presence and absence, fullness and emptiness, representation and rapture is explored. The process of depicting a motif is one pole, the simultaneous detachment from any motif is the other. Seeing becomes an interplay of perception. Connections can be made to the tradition of Chinese painting of “Shanshui” (mountain-water) painting, which assumed similar ways of seeing as a process between two poles of motific emptiness and fullness.