Qiu Shihua

Qiu Shihua
Born	1940 Zizhong, Sichuan Province, China
Nationality	Chinese
Education	Xi'an Academy of Fine Art, Xi'an
Known for	Landscape painting
Movement	Contemporary art

Qiu Shihua (Chinese: 邱世华) is a notable Chinese landscape painter born 1940 in Zizhong, Sichuan Province, China. He lives and works in Beijing and Shenzhen.

This is classical Chinese landscape painting: drifting clouds, horizontally spreading fog banks forming empty spaces, precipitous cliffs and jagged crags, perhaps a few weather-beaten trees, a waterfall; water breaking on the rocks; ink that seems to cling organically to the paper, yet still appears liquid. The Chinese for landscape is shan-shui; shan means mountain and shui water. The aim of traditional landscape painting was to create a harmonious union of these two elements.

Qiu Shihua was born in 1940 in Sichuan Province, but today lives and works in the new city of Beijing and Shenzhen. As one of the artists who enjoyed the privilege of foreign travel, he visited France in the 1980s and studied the works of the Impressionists. Qiu underwent an incredible development in the course of the 1990s, moving from traditional landscape painting to find a very personal style. An un-trained eye might find in his work little more than an almost unmodulated white, but his minimalist style of painting has nothing in common with the forms of expression from Western art history. The paintings seem Impressionist, but the Impressionists’ ideals---the view from out-side, the pure appearance of the outside world on the retina—are the opposite of Qiu’s. Rather, he represents the landscape—or what is left of it—as an expression of the soul. Nor are his white paintings obligated to abstraction or monochromatism. Qiu certainly abstracts from reality, goes to the limits in reducing the recognizable world, but it is always there somewhere; all his pictures remain figurative. They are radical within the category of landscape painting. They follow no systematic, conceptual search for the fundamentals of painting, of the kind Robert Ryman pursues in his works, for example. Qiu Shihua’s paintings originate in traditional Chinese landscape painting. They were initially done on paper, then paper mounted on canvas, and most recently, canvas (ungrounded or almost ungrounded). The formats grew and grew. Slightly speckled oil paint spreads out across the paper or canvas.

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