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Dining on discarded tables is art to one craftsman
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IT was a random trip to an antique market in suburban Shanghai that ignites Qiu Jia’s obsession with formative art using discarded and scrap wooden materials.
“What do they say? One man’s waste is another man’s treasure,” said the 41-year-old Shanghai native. “I saw a dozen wooden tables, discarded and in poor appearance, piled up in a corner, and thought I could do something with them.”
The artist was attracted to the original plain colors of the discarded tables, from sandy to dark walnut, as well as the scratches and marks left on them.
“They are the traces of everyday life,” said the artist.
Thus he threw himself into creation and has since been working on the “fundamental objects” series for more than two years, building up structural formations with bits and pieces of various wood he collected. A dozen pieces will be showcased at Liu Haisu Art Museum from November 10-18 on Qiu’s solo exhibition, “Into What Has Been There.”
The formations of wooden artworks are simple and plain, like fractured cones on round bases. Yet the intersection surface varied from piece to piece.
It reveals the concept of “growth” — each piece seems like “grow and evolve from scratch,” via collage and a layer-up of myriad wood and planks, similar to “building blocks.”
Observing from different angles, the formation also varies, triggering all kinds of imagination.
“Some people saw rolling mountains, some said it’s dense forest,” Qui said. “It just shows the enormous possibilities of a single object.”
When working on the wooden cones, he uses ordinary materials common in daily life, such as plywood, bandages, white glue and a pneumatic nail gun, so as to keep as much of the original features of the wood pieces as possible.
“To me, tables symbolize family in China. Making a table in the past is a big thing. It’s an object that passes on for generations, a stable element and a basic unit that around which a family builds up,” Qiu said.
“A table is where we Chinese have the Spring Festival dinner, where the adults convene a meeting or a discussion, and where children were not allowed to mess around when I was young. And kids love to go underneath the table. It’s perhaps the very first place when a child forms the sense of space in daily life.”
When the tables were abandoned and flow-line production replaced handmade craftsmanship, the memories and traditions embedded on the old objects are therefore destroyed.
However, Qiu saw a chance of making them into artworks, “to give them new meanings and respect.”
And all he had to do is to present a harmonious blend of aesthetics standards of different families from, very likely, different regions.
“Art, after all, has no standards. It’s an act of appreciation. It’s fascinating to create new aesthetic experience by using basic skills and normal techniques,” he said.
Currently teaching sculpture art at Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts in Shanghai University, Qiu used to make concrete sculptural artworks in early years of his art career. But he quickly got bored and felt retrained.
“Traditional concrete sculpture has its limitations. When you see a sculpture of a shark, you don’t have to walk around the back to know what a shark’s tail is going to look like,” he said.
He steered onto a new path of abstract formative art in 2012, which provides abundant uncertainties and freedom to experiment with materials and techniques.
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