11 April, 2022 I still believe that the Covid-19 pandemic will vanish

 

Photos linked from artist Qiu Zhijie's website

The above photos are a part of an on-going project by Qiu Zhijie and his students. The project is called A Suicidology of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, commencing 2008. It concerns the social intervention and art articulation on a particular bridge which is a place many people decided to commit their suicide. Through collaboration with NGO founders, social researches, Qiu is aimed at applying his Total Art therapy on the particular place and saving lives. The Chinese characters in the first photo, whether written with the blood of someone who has or has not committed suicide, means "when love is gone, the only thing I can do is to forget love" [当爱烟消云散，我剩下的只有忘情]. In the video made along the project Where is the capital of Madagascar? (2008),

artist Qiu Zhijie wiped out the sentence, and wrote with his blood "where is the capital of Madagascar?" [马达加斯加的首都在哪里]. 

Some works are exhibited again in the later exhibition  Living Writing, available to be visited on-line.

Art scholar Hopfener has conducted a serious study on this project and Qiu Zhijie's Total Art, an art theory emphasizing self-cultivation and transformation of individuals. On the curious question, she states:

On the one hand, as Johnson Chang has written, being confronted with a seemingly nonsense question the reader of Qiu Zhijie’s awkward message is asked to pause and relect, to change perspective and to literally widen her/his horizon by relecting on the meaning this sentence could possibly have and by literally directing his/her thoughts to the geographically far away island of Madagascar (Hoferner as cited from Chang, 2017). Indeed the opaque and seemingly nonsense sentence ‘Where is the capital of Madagascar?’ could be read as a contemporary Zen Buddhist koan that is an instrument of enlightenment.19 (Hopfener, 2017, p. 10)

In other words, this question is not for an answer, but as a Buddhist koan to suddenly cut off the thoughts of the audience. 

Another work produced along the process is "Don’t lean upon a balustrade" (2008), which the artist carved and constructed a bridge made of coal with his students. This work inspected the history of the Nanjing Yangtze River bridge and relates individuals with the memory of a place and his/her-self and reality. 

Investigations on the work of artist Qiu Zhijie reminds me the effect of the place and specific situation in the everyday life. I was encouraged by his work to re-examine my situation in my own time and space. 

On emptiness, it means the clearance of all meanings and understandings of something. If everything is due to be over one day, and is to be the 'emptiness', then where is the meaning of life. This is the question always comes after the concept of impermanence. The other side of the concept of everything being temporary is,  the miseries is also impermanent. Thus I wrote, with my situation of studying through on-line networking for over a year:

A video is then made based on my situation

 

References

Hopfener, B. (2017). Tomorrow, things will be different Qiu Zhijie’s concept of keeping alive life through art. Journal for Cultural Research, 21(1), 4-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2017.1311492