La rivoluzione gentile / QIU YI

"The bamboo cane is strong in that it is able to bend with the wind, not allowing itself to be knocked down by the weather but allowing the storm to slide over it without breaking it" (Confucius) MA-EC Gallery presents from Nov. 24 to Jan. 14, 2023 the exhibition "The Gentle Revolution," the first solo show in Milan by artist Qiu Yi, curated by Elisabetta Roncati.

The exhibition project offers the public three installations, including one previously unseen, created by the artist between 2019 and 2022 and characterized by intense conceptuality and abstraction, an exemplary synthesis of his visual poetics. Qiu Yi, a Chinese sculptor born in 1982 and based in Florence, aims to combine seemingly distant elements such as Eastern and Western culture, past and present, tradition and contemporaneity by expressing himself through works that condense his multicultural artistic experience with the expressiveness typical of certain historical movements such as Informal, Conceptual and Arte Povera. Starting from traditional Chinese philosophies such as Confucianism and Taoism, the artist reworks meanings and signifiers to build connections between worlds that are only seemingly distant. Qiu Yi's installations come into contact with the spaces of the Gallery that hosts them without distorting them, but creating a harmonious relationship in which the visitor becomes the central element to begin the story. And so, in the first room of the MA-EC Gallery's historic venue, "A Thousand Words" (2021) appears: a work destined to grow over time and which takes its title from Zhou Xingsi's sixth-century AD script used for teaching the Chinese language. First presented in 2021 in Florence, the installation this time is only on rice paper and not on canvas.

The signs in black ink lose their linguistic-referential connotations to invite visitors to consider them as pure pictorial gestures, however imbued with deep meanings. It is not simply writing, but neither is it pure aesthetic action: again, it is the delicate balance between the two acts that prevails. Next we encounter "Ao Tu" (2019): some ancient stone tubs, used in the past to dissolve India ink, have been translated into numerous casts. The full installation would include as many as 500 of them. And so the full and the empty interface, the Yin and the Yang, the masculine and the feminine universe: everything becomes fluid and interchangeable. Once again Qiu Yi becomes the architect of a connection between different experiences and elements, bending the spectacularity of his interventions to the power of reflection. Closing the exhibition is "Prophecy" (2022) inspired by Laozi's Daodejing, while for form by the Pitti Tondo and Michelangelo's Dying Slave. As in many of his other works, the starting point is organic matter, the natural element that according to Qiu Yi is inescapable to aspire to the balance of factors for which he yearns so much. A further peculiarity of "Prophecy" is its seriality: the material of which the depiction is composed tends gradually to dry out and it is necessary to add water, an essential factor of life, to bring it back to its initial state. The artistic past and present thus meet, demonstrating how all creativity harbors in nuce a classical matrix. Slow movements, seriality, mise-en-scène: Qiu Yi's installations recall traditional Chinese theater plays while winking at the use of art made by his compatriots since the 1980s. Yet the artist's intent is not overt rupture or critique. To disruptive action he opposes a different method: to act on the road to reconciliation, to use reflection to induce a change of outlook that ultimately reaches a pacification. It almost always takes a revolution to bring about a breath of change: Qiu Yi's is a "gentle revolution" in manner and tone, but no less effective or imbued with deep meaning.