White Landscapes
At first glance, Qiu Shihua’s works appear as monochrome, almost completely white canvases. However, on closer inspection, expansive landscapes emerge from their painterly surfaces, which, depending on the way you look at them, gradually blossom with detail, or recede again from view. The complex visibility of the images can only be truly grasped through closer scrutiny. Beyond the mere act of seeing, an appreciation of these canvases requires the ‘thinking eye’, a mode of seeing consistently demanded by relatively few contemporary artists working today.
Qiu Shihua was born in 1940 in Zizhong, Sichuan Province, China. He studied painting at the Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts, where his training was primarily in traditional Chinese painting. At the end of his time as a student he created works in a socialist-realist vein that drew from Soviet models. He completed his training in 1962 and worked through the Cultural Revolution up to 1984 as a painter of posters for a cinema in Tongchuan. Exhibitions and travels in and around Europe were important in the development of his oeuvre, as was his turning to Taoism.
Qiu Shihua lives and works in Beijing and Shenzhen, China. In April 2012, an extensive solo exhibition opened at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Until January 6th, 2013, Qiu Shihua's works can still be seen in the Museum Pfalzgalerie in Kaiserslautern.
Reformierte Dorfkirche
Via Maistra 18 (Pedestrian Zone), 7500 St. Moritz
08. – 24. February 2013
Opening Hours
Monday – Friday: 14.00 – 19.00h
Saturday – Sunday: 13.00 – 19.00h
Sunday 24.02.2012: 13.00 – 16.00h