NEW YORK, NY.- Boers-Li Gallery announces Qiu Anxiong’s first solo exhibition in New York, opening on January 27th, 2018 at the gallery's recently-launched space on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. This exhibition features the U.S. premiere of the third and final installment of Qiu’s widely-acclaimed video animation trilogy, New Classics of Mountains and Seas (2006-2017). Its first episode was shown in 2013 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition: Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China. Later that year, the second episode was presented in Copenhagen at the Arken Museum of Modern Art.

New Classics of Mountains and Seas III was completed in 2017 and made its debut last March at our Beijing location. Projected onto a large-scale screen, the 30-minute video depicts an apocalyptic future in the post-information age, where the deteriorating environment turns humankind itself into virtual reality.

Taking cues from the Classics of Mountains and Seas, which offers a historical overview of Chinese culture and geography predating the Qin Dynasty, Qiu Anxiong’s trilogy narrates a multi-layered, “spatialogical” history where pre-modern and contemporary subjects collide. A loose narrative ties together Part I and Part II where the world as described in the Classics is fundamentally infected by industrialization, which leads to climate change and wars over power and territory. Part III speculates on a dystopia where virtual reality is reality and tradition is nothing more than an image.

Qiu Anxiong interweaves his ink-wash-style paintings with the animated world and inserts architecture and signs from Shanghai where he lives, cinematic effects mimicking Hollywood movies, and symbols from pre-modern Chinese ink painting. Anchoring the fantastic with the real world, transferring the past to the present and further into the future, Qiu's New Classics of Mountains and Seas offers an anachronic view that challenges linear, materialistic ways of seeing.

A pioneer of Chinese video animation, Qiu Anxiong deepens the resonance of animation by introducing the aesthetics of ink painting. This approach serves his non-linear narrative which, in Part III, is most evident. Interlacing imagery of the real with the virtual, the video reflects on the contemporary world where the delineation between the virtual and the real has become increasingly blurred, and the fictional can actually augment our sense of what is real.

Graduated from Sichuan Academy of Art in 1994, Qiu Anxiong later studied painting at Kassel University’s Kunsthochschule, and returned home in 2003. Since then, he has been teaching at the animation department of China Eastern Normal University in Shanghai. In 2007, he launched Museum of the Unknown which functioned as a community, a platform for various kinds of expression as well as an exhibition space, seeking to stir up conversation and discussion about social concerns.

Qiu Anxiong has participated in numerous international exhibitions at venues such as: Jeu de Paume, Paris; Gasträume 2014 - Public Art in Zürich; the 54th Venice Biennale; the San Diego Museum of Art; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Espacio de Arte Contemporeáno (EAC), Montevideo; Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Big Screen Liverpool, UK; MoCA, Shanghai; the Hong Kong Museum of Art; the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), and others.

His works are in several public collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Spencer Museum, University of Kansas, Lawrence; the Oxford University Museum; Kunsthaus Zurich; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the Hong Kong Museum of Art; the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, and others.