June 23 – July 16, 2005

Ping Qiu | eating chocolate - performance | review
and other work

> opening June 23 | 6 - 9pm &  June 25 | 2 - 6pm

Lotus (Rubber Gloves) 2001

Eating Chocolate - Performance

Eating Chocolate - Performance

Finger Flowers from Venice 1999

Ping Qiu | A Chinese artist, living in Switzerland and working in Germany.

A young female artist packs a suitcase, takes what little money she can call her own, and departs. Encouraged by the sculptor Shinkichi Tajiri during his visit to China, she decides, after studying at the Zhijiang Academy of fine Arts in Hangzhou and a sojourn in shanghai, to once again take up art studies, and applies at old West Berlin’s Hochschule der Kunste. She is accepted. This sort of biographical event can seduce us into comparisons with great legends, such as Vasari’s description of the first encounter between Giotto and Cimabue. Such stories, nurturing the cult of genius in virtually hagiographic style, are still written today. They continue to be popular; the ritualized eulogies familiar from exhibition openings are their most extreme form. When Ping Qiu speak about her voyage, however, it is the pragmatic element which dominates – it was simply so, without flourishes and with all the attendant complexities somehow relativised.

Transformed everyday objects (balls of ‘wool’ made of metal, forks) and the bodily (repeatedly, castings of hands) are the defining elements of Ping Qiu’s (kinetic) sculptures and room installations. Her interior, water and open-space installations in particular are imbued with a sense of poetic transformation. Upon closer inspection they seem to mutate into swimming ensembles that resemble starfish, amongst which the artist is rocking nestled in an enameled, white bathtub. The floral ensembles have been spotted floating in amorphous agglomerations on Venetian canals and in proximity to the Arsenale, or garlanding a standardized garden house from the building-supplies centre. In the form of a red dress made of rubber gloves they clothe Ping Qiu, covering her only scantily, as she lies in the bathroom along the white-tiled wall and regards us, doubled by a mirror. In other works, another young woman is seen upon a living room table with fringed tablecloth, or draped upon a recamier. Neither of the women seems comfortable in the rubber embrace. The faces, the gazes seem distant. Rubber gloves, at least, embrace the women, or rest upon their bodies in the absence of any other person. In another series, the hands have been fused into crab-like creatures. They hang in fences – or is Ping Qiu attempting futilely to fish them from the pool? For the bottom of her net is open. Or is she setting other the ridged crustaceans for our amusement?
Wolfgang Knapp

this exhibition is supported by
Arts Council of Switzerland