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Lot Essay
“I remember when I was little I would live in fantasies every day. Living in the starting edge of the Taklimakan Desert in which the skies were vast, the steppes were wild, and when the wind blew the tall grasses would bend down to reveal grazing sheep and cattle. Those fragmented and broken memories pack my current harsh, contradictory and heavily burdened existence and life experiences.”
The Desire Scenery in Qin Feng’s mind reflects his childhood memory. In the vast landscape of Xinjiang where he was born and grew up, Qin Feng remembers the sky and the land, the climate, and the creatures that thrive under this unique place that is endowed with beautiful natural wonders and an amalgamation of cultures and ethnicities. His “scenery” does not reproduce a real scene or landscape, but is a realm of imagination. Character-like symbols are the most recurrent theme in Qin’s works. Through adjusting and reinventing calligraphy, the symbols become his tools for intense self-expression. His calligraphic lines evoke notions of desire, longing, touch, and sometimes brute power that enables him to create works in enormous scale.
Series Desire Scenery No. 5141 is unique among his works as Qin’s written symbols are not at the centre of his creation. Quite the opposite, they cluster at the periphery, and are only connected by a complex web formed by a single red line traversing throughout the three panels, centring in the middle. The red line seemingly joins together ideas, people or events, expressing a longing for unity or an unconscious connection that underlies the fundamental human relationship. In the early 1980s Qin Feng worked on a project where he suspended a red line across the road leading to a pilgrimage site to see how visitors reacted. This project has touched him deeply and from then on, he often portrayed the red line figuratively in his work. This red line connects Qin Feng’s past and the present, the East and the West, memory and history, so that it inherits and preserves what is most genuine in culture.
The Desire Scenery in Qin Feng’s mind reflects his childhood memory. In the vast landscape of Xinjiang where he was born and grew up, Qin Feng remembers the sky and the land, the climate, and the creatures that thrive under this unique place that is endowed with beautiful natural wonders and an amalgamation of cultures and ethnicities. His “scenery” does not reproduce a real scene or landscape, but is a realm of imagination. Character-like symbols are the most recurrent theme in Qin’s works. Through adjusting and reinventing calligraphy, the symbols become his tools for intense self-expression. His calligraphic lines evoke notions of desire, longing, touch, and sometimes brute power that enables him to create works in enormous scale.
Series Desire Scenery No. 5141 is unique among his works as Qin’s written symbols are not at the centre of his creation. Quite the opposite, they cluster at the periphery, and are only connected by a complex web formed by a single red line traversing throughout the three panels, centring in the middle. The red line seemingly joins together ideas, people or events, expressing a longing for unity or an unconscious connection that underlies the fundamental human relationship. In the early 1980s Qin Feng worked on a project where he suspended a red line across the road leading to a pilgrimage site to see how visitors reacted. This project has touched him deeply and from then on, he often portrayed the red line figuratively in his work. This red line connects Qin Feng’s past and the present, the East and the West, memory and history, so that it inherits and preserves what is most genuine in culture.