Qiu Zhijie: mapping as thinking

Qiu Zhijie: Map of Utopia

Qiu Zhijie has been showing at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva recently. I have seen his work at the Venice Biennale and have always been impressed by his epic use of mapping to develop concepts and the way his maps fit into a much wider context of 'total art'. 'Total art' is Qiu Zhijie's term for a way of thinking that can fit together all the various strands of his art work, these can be academic writing, performance, moving image, object making or drawing.  

I'm particularly interested in Qiu Zhijie's work because it has helped me think about the relationship between bodies and landscapes, something that is central to my own work at the moment. I suspect he has spent a lot of time looking at drawings of the body's acupuncture points and interrelationships between energy flows. Acupuncture is used to stimulate the body's own healing processes, and is an ancient system that seeks to restore balance or homeostasis, and by tapping into these older processes of thinking I suspect we may be able to find a way through to a better understanding of our place in this world. 

Acupuncture diagrams

As you can see from the acupuncture diagrams above, every part of the body has a vital function in the flow of energy and if we take this idea and map it onto the world as a whole we can perhaps get a better idea of how the world's interconnected systems can be visualised. Qiu Zhijie's maps, often drawn on a huge scale, are annotated with his very personal take on naming and association, a sort of personalised geography, one that is as much political as economic, as emotional as cartographic. The idea of trying to visualise things much bigger or more complex than anyone can really understand also fascinates me, the idea of 'hyper-objects' as in the writings of Timothy Morton, being central to this. 

Qiu Zhijie's maps

I've been working with maps for a while, but have more recently been trying to make images of the human body as if it too was something that emerges from the world in the same way as rocks emerge from a landscape. I've also seen some of my map drawings as being like bodies. I'm searching for images that can be read in two ways, as human and as part of the natural world. The two orientations for paper, landscape and portrait being combined, so that all landscapes are portraits and vice versa. 

I was very aware of drawings of the interior of the human body when I made the drawing above. I had been looking at the Evelyn Tables. The Royal College of Surgeons houses the Hunterian museum and if you go there you can find the Evelyn Tables. These images of arteries, nerves and veins are all meticulously dissected, and once cut out, were then affixed to a pine wooden board, and then preserved under several coats of varnish. You could argue that they are an early form of collage drawing. But I began to read these images as indicators of landscape, like drystone walls cutting through the snow covered landscapes of the Yorkshire Dales. 

The Evelyn Tables

Yorkshire Dales

Terry Frost: Drypoint

When I was a young artist and first living in Leeds the Art correspondent of the Yorkshire Post was W.T. Oliver; Patrick Oliver's father. He had a cottage in Starbotton in the Yorkshire Dales and he occasionally used to offer it to starving artists as a short term respite and place to work; something I was really grateful for as it enabled us as a family to have a holiday at a time of very little money. An artist who had benefitted from WTO's generosity some 20 years before me was Terry Frost, and you could see how his time in the cottage had influenced his work. The fields of the Dales were divided by drystone walls and as you walk the tops of the hills the fields flatten out, especially in winter time, the experience becoming very map-like as you walk through the snow and look down into the valley.

Terry Frost: Leeds 1956

The image above was a drypoint printed in Leeds in 1965 and it reveals a moment in Frost's career when his abstracted forms were flattening out, a type of mapping of his Dales experience, interestingly his plant like whorls were he said influenced by the experience of watching sheep's wool being blown about by high winds. 

In my earlier post about the world drawing itself  I had been looking at how the mapping of river systems is very similar to the visualising of the body's veins and arteries and in my own clumsy way I was feeling my way towards a certain something, a type of human/landscape, we are all star stuff, everything is integrated type of imagery. Something I could draw as much from memory as from life, as much from feeling tone as from academic research. 

I have just started a large drawing whereby I'm trying to fit all these ideas together, part body, part map, part landscape and part allegory of present times and while I do this I will be making all sorts of other work that opens out further possibilities belonging to different aspects of the idea. This is something I have done for many years now, making ceramics, drawing, printmaking, writing texts etc.; each element being something that can be seen as part of an integrated whole. Mapping as thinking can be very powerful and like with all maps the legend or key is vital to how they are read, and in this case the key is spread out and extended throughout all my writing and drawing and making, hard to find, but definitely there somewhere. I like Qiu Zhijie's idea of 'Total Art', it reminds me of Joseph Beuys, everything an artist does is part of some sort of emerging 'gesamtkunstwerk'; a term that was first used to describe the work of Richard Wagner, a composer who wanted to tap into the foundations of myth in order to revitalise the music of his time. 

Bayreuth: The staging of Wagner

Sometimes Wagner's operas are staged on an epic scale and there is something about that scale that I would like to capture in my own images. As always I shall see what happens, one thing leads to another and it is only in the doing that whatever is going to come out, comes out. 

Trying to fuse a body (hand) with a landscape: Digital print

See also:

Drawing maps

An exhibition of maps 

Mapping the body