Untitled

Untitled, like all of Qiu Shihua’s mature paintings, appears upon first impression to be nothing more than a blank white canvas (Figure 1). Extended viewing, however, reveals forms beneath layered applications of white paint, which begin to coalesce into a legible scene if given sufficient time to emerge. In the case of Untitled, which Qiu painted in 2006 during an extended stay in the San Francisco Bay Area, groupings of gray marks, barely legible at first glance, seem to emerge as if from a thick layer of fog, coalescing into a landscape scene, perhaps a mist-enshrouded, tree-lined lakeshore, or maybe even the San Francisco skyline. Qiu achieves this effect by first painting a basic outline of a scene in black or another dark color, often on unprimed canvas, and then obscuring that scene with repeated layers of dilute, semitransparent paint. In refusing to pander to the eye, Qiu forces the viewer to slow down and allow the scene to emerge, thereby putting the viewer into a frame of mind close to meditation, a flow state in which he himself purports to paint: “When I paint, I do not think of structure or theme, what I seek is a certain ‘flavour’—a rhythm of spirit and energy, so that the soul drifts in the painting, like a shadow in the mind. Everything is flat and calm. ‘Form’ is unimportant.” Qiu is deeply interested in Daoist philosophy, which sees the cosmos as a field of interacting opposites—yin and yang, light and dark, solid and void—and his paintings eloquently embody this worldview, denying the viewer knowledge of whether the image is emerging or disappearing. Qiu’s rigorous minimalism, which draws in equal measure on ideas and visual traditions of Europe and China, is a vivid encapsulation of the hybridity and richness of contemporary Chinese painting, in which artists often have a broad range of sources upon which to draw for inspiration.