Conversation: Qu Leilei
By Jiaqi Kang
This interview was originally conducted in Mandarin and was published in Issue #7 “MUD (泥)”. Get it now on BLURB. If you would like to read the original transcript, please get in touch with us via email at sinethetamag@gmail.com.
Jiaqi Kang travels to London to speak with Qu Leilei (曲磊磊, b. 1951) a famous Chinese artist who has lived in Britain for the past few decades, where he has had two solo exhibitions at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. His work has also been acquired and exhibited at the British Museum. In conjunction with his latest Ashmolean exhibition, the museum held a conference in November 2017, inviting scholars from around the world to discuss the post-Cultural Revolution guerilla art group of which Qu was a part, Sino artists in the diaspora, and the Guggenheim’s recent group show on contemporary Chinese art. Jiaqi met Qu on that day and subsequently interviewed him in March.
Qu Leilei lives in the suburbs, an hour away by tube from London’s skyscrapers. The neighborhood is quintessentially British, with rows of compact brown and white houses glued together and big windows pushing out to reflect the overcast sky.
It’s a Sunday morning, so there isn’t a single person in the street, and curtains are drawn up tight. If it weren’t for the cars, this would be a ghost town. But once I step inside Qu’s house, the grey clouds dissipate, replaced by a cheerful, wrinkled face as he greets me at the door, and I realise too late that I’ve forgotten to bring a gift.
In the kitchen, Qu’s British wife and fellow artist Caroline Deane, whose impasto still life paintings decorate their home, is cooking lunch. The smell of roast chicken fills the living room, in which couches are arranged against the backdrop of wall-length bookshelves stuffed with huge hardcover editions of artistic monographs in Chinese and English. Tea is poured, and Qu shows me photos of his daughter Celia’s recent trip to Yunnan. He cuts up the chicken for lunch, and dessert is fruit salad with cream and sugar, though Qu takes it plain.
Witnessing his peaceful life today, it’s hard to believe that only 40 years ago, Qu Leilei was a major member of the Beijing avant-garde group ‘The Stars’, who directly resisted the Chinese Communist Party by advocating for freedom of expression. This collection of two dozen artists that also included Ma Desheng, Wang Keping, and Ai Weiwei brought Chinese art history out of the state-controlled socialist realism of the Cultural Revolution (under which they had come of age) and paved the way for the ’85 New Wave as well as the post-’89 contemporary art movement.
“In the beginning, the latter two areas [of Chinese art] were researched more by Western scholars, but the question they ask is, ‘Why is there a break in history? How did they go from the Cultural Revolution straight to ‘85…’ In the middle there’s a very important connection,” Qu tells me. In recent years there’s been a renewed interest in the study and collection of Stars-era artwork.
The Stars set up their first exhibition on September 27, 1979, hanging their pictures on the fence of the park outside the National Gallery of China, which had refused to host them. The group had no coherent style, let alone a manifesto — they were young people who had been deprived of formal education, who were motivated by a desperate need to learn new things and explore new ideas, and who sought to effect change. Qu Leilei’s work from the period is raw and full of spirit: jagged lines slash across the page to create outlines of contorted human bodies and exhausted limbs, the Mao-era propaganda woodcuts turned on their heads. He had been inspired by the victims of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, whose misery he’d experienced first-hand as a cameraman for China Central Television. The next day, on September 28, the police shut down the exhibition, and on October 1, the 30th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, the artists organised a protest.
The Stars, and similar film and literary collectives, were born out of the Beijing Spring — a period of burgeoning movement and restlessness, centered around the Xidan Democracy Wall. Copies of the clandestine journal Jintian were printed and handed out at the wall, which was covered in posters that people used to freely express their opinions. It was also at this location that the protest began, the artists holding a banner saying “March to Protect the Constitution” and singing the Internationale. In November, the exhibition was allowed to reopen for 10 days in Beihai Park. The summer of the following year, The Stars exhibited again, this time inside the National Gallery itself.
At around the same time, Deng Xiaoping was emerging as the new leader of the nation. He’d originally supported the Democracy Wall, who returned his support, but once he consolidated his power, the ideas there — in particular, Wei Jingsheng’s text advocating for democracy — became a nuisance. Wei was arrested and tried, but Qu Leilei used his broadcasting employee status to secretly record the trial with a device belonging to a Frenchman (Emmanuel Bellefroid, whose interracial relationship with Stars artist Li Shuang would later cause an international scandal) from inside his bag. The transcript was made public at the Wall. Qu expected to be arrested, but they never came for him: “They didn’t want to make the incident even bigger.” But he would soon leave the country.
I’ve always wondered at the contrast between Qu’s work in China and after China. As a youth in Beijing, he’d been passionate and radical, but his British work — architectural sketches, hyper-realistic hands — appear tame in comparison, not least because their apolitical nature is so removed from the strong sense of political conviction that Qu expressed when talking about the Wei Jingsheng affair. It was “义不容辞,” he tells me: an unshirkable duty, one that, in combination with his Stars membership, resulted in Qu no longer being given opportunities at the TV station and being rejected by the Central Academy of Fine Arts’ graduate program despite achieving the highest marks in the entrance exams. One by one, his peers disappeared abroad: Ai Weiwei and Zhang Hongtu to the United States, Wang Keping and Ma Desheng to France. In 1985, Qu arrived in the UK with 30 American dollars and a roll of artwork. His art-making ceased, for the next few years, to be about expression, and instead became about survival. He tells me about drawing portraits for tourists at Piccadilly Circus and running workshops for calligraphy and lantern-making; scrubbing dishes at restaurants and taking minutes on typewriters.
Qu both is and isn’t hard to interview: he is full of words, and the initial small talk about the origins of both our uncommon surnames quickly leads into a monologue about the chaotic nature of Chinese history, which prompts him to begin telling me about his latest artistic project for the next two hours. He jumps so swiftly from topic to topic that it overwhelms me: I find myself crossing out the questions I’d written down into my notebook as he answers them of his own accord. While this ensured that there were no awkward moments or lack of information, I felt that I wasn’t the one controlling the conversation. Later, reading a 2015 essay he wrote reflecting on the events of 1979, I realise that he brings up the same points: he’s spoken to so many people that he’s long compiled a script of memories, asides, and name-drops to refer to when asked about his life. It doesn’t help that I’m prevented from asking difficult, probing questions by a mixture of guest politeness, my lack of specific vocabulary in Mandarin, and the Confucian dynamics that demand deference and respect for this older, wiser man that I must call Qu Laoshi, Teacher Qu.
“I think that we are always facing the same three questions: One, why do you make art? Two, what is your art about? Three, how do you make it?”
As he speaks, though, I realise that Qu isn’t the sell-out I’d suspected him to be — in fact, he’s the opposite. I’d seen the difference between his earlier and later works as a degeneration process with British Qu returning to more traditional media like ink, and focusing on more traditional themes, like the large-scale studies of light and shadow through nude portraits, or Everybody’s Life is an Epic, a series about ordinary people’s lives that reminds me of Humans of New York. Where had the dynamic revolutionism of Chinese Qu gone? But Qu Leilei’s work isn’t unified in terms of media, content, or even style — rather, he makes art about whatever concerns him. It seems simple, but it can be difficult for an established artist to make whatever they wish: the market wants recognisable works, like Yue Minjun’s laughing pink men or Zao Wou-ki’s abstract slashes. Qu works on a different project around every five years, adjusting his practice to fit the artistic intention.
“I think that we are always facing the same three questions: One, why do you make art? Two, what is your art about? Three, how do you make it?” he says. Depending on what his current interests are, he will use different techniques to express them. He continues: “If someone says, ‘I just want to make money’, then that’s fine, and there’s a certain way to make money from art. If I wanted to, I could propel an artwork’s price upwards with just three things: politics, violence, and sex. Some Hollywood movies are just these three things. But I only make art about what I believe in.” In the 1970s, Qu believed in the urgent need for social change because he’d witnessed the turbulence of recent Chinese history. After the deaths of Mao and Zhou Enlai and the persecution of the Gang of Four in 1976, a cataclysmic year for Qu and for China not least because of a deadly earthquake, Qu says, “the atmosphere was frozen solid.” All of society was buzzing, waiting for a new world order to come around. “The veterans were getting ready for another civil war.” His work is impatient and impulsive. By contrast, when Qu needed to assimilate into British culture in the 1980s, his British Life series is calm, curious, and contemplative. Although the Tiananmen Square Incident in 1989 shook him to the core and prompted him to reconsider more serious topics, he never fully lost the tranquility and introspection he’d gained from his early British works.
What really sets the Greeks apart though, according to Qu, is their conception of beauty — an ideal that exists for itself; art for art’s sake.
In the 1990s, faced with the oncoming new millennium, Qu worked on Facing the Future, painting hands as a symbol of humanity and unity. His current series, Empire, comes at a time when China is significantly expanding its economy and aggressively asserting its position on the world stage. It goes back in time to pick out Qin dynasty terracotta warriors and place them next to modern soldiers, an obvious comment… but about what? When I tell him that I see the glorifying gaze as ironic (a word with which I struggle, as I’m unable to find the equivalent in Chinese in the moment), he vaguely mentions “values” and “human dignity”, seemingly preferring for the audience to have its own specific interpretations.
Indeed, Qu is preoccupied with big ideas about history, fate, and what drives us forward. Qu, like a huge number of artists, is fascinated and inspired by Antiquity, to the point of worship. Perhaps this is because he was suddenly exposed to every element of Western art history at once after being deprived of it for years, causing him to latch on to this one period that irrevocably impacted all art that came after it. He frequently compares Ancient Greece with China, telling me that culture is determined by geography. Greece was by the sea and composed of small islands, so it was fundamentally outward-looking and commerce-based, whereas China needed patriarchal authority to maintain order in its villages. The Greeks derived their knowledge from logical deduction, building upon axioms, but the Chinese mindset is based on induction and generalisation. What really sets the Greeks apart though, according to Qu, is their conception of beauty — an ideal that exists for itself; art for art’s sake. When talking about his studies of the female nude, Qu rejects all sensual interpretations, saying that viewers wouldn’t read a Raphael as erotic. “This is art,” he says. “It’s the aesthetic that Pygmalion pursued.” Beauty is paramount in his work — the only constant throughout the decades. “As long as we haven’t been enslaved by robots, our values of beauty and humanity are what is most important.”
The Greeks’ prioritisation of such beauty rendered their art timeless. “Baudelaire says that art has two features: one is immediate relevance, one is future endurance. But what I pursue is to be both contemporary and durable.” The only truly timeless categories of art, he says, are those of Antiquity, the Renaissance, and Impressionism. Qu strives to achieve even a fraction of these movements’ perfection through his own way: Chinese ink painting. He wields this tricky medium as though it were as slick as oil paint, creating highly detailed, mimetic works that are stunningly dynamic. “My technique of using Chinese ink to demonstrate light and shadow doesn’t exist in Chinese tradition, so I will draw it in, and turn them into a single entity. Later when you have kids you’ll know,” he adds, referring to his own experience raising a mixed child and to my status as a culture-crossing future parent, “we cannot say [in English] either this or that, and we cannot say neither this nor that. We should say both this and that.” The hybrid, uncategorizable nature of his art is his biggest source of pride and what he hopes will immortalise him for future generations.
Although Qu Leilei is most often asked about his past, he lives facing the future, always thinking about his next project.
Qu is constantly observing and pondering the world around him, and the ideas that he encounters are reflected in his art. He tells me about his new series, which will focus on science and technology. Inspired by conversations he had with physicist Xue Qikun (“the closest to winning the next Nobel Prize”), Qu believes that the materials humans use determine the direction of our development (stone, bronze, iron, then steel, and now silicon). He plans to set up a multimedia installation expressing this view of history — but he asks me to keep the actual planned art work under wraps, in case other artists steal his idea. But he can, and does, spend hours raving about how new discoveries in superconductivity will change the world, how language shapes our thoughts and attitudes, and how he understands Xi Jinping’s political strategy because they grew up in the same era.
Although Qu Leilei is most often asked about his past, he lives facing the future, always thinking about his next project. He’s willing to speak about The Stars and is eager for a reunion exhibition, but he says, “We held our exhibition outside the National Gallery, we were censored, and then we gathered at the Democracy Wall and we marched. That was the end. My task for history has been completed. As an event of Chinese art history, we’ve already done what we needed to do.” What happened in Beijing 40 years ago is written history, a thrilling moment when everyone’s paths converged to accomplish the same goal… a unique alignment of stars. But now he and his friends have gone their separate ways, each making their own art about their own interests. It reminds me of what we’re trying to do with sinθ: a space where diasporic creatives can meet and share their work, but the only thing that we have in common is our experience of diaspora, and that needn’t glue us together — we all have our own artistic intentions, and thus our magazine is for the diaspora but not about the diaspora.
At the end of the interview, Qu gifts me a book of his early art and diary entries. Its cover shows a very early work: a hand squeezing a swollen torso. It’s made up of rough, scribbled lines, a world away from the painstakingly soft and almost invisible brushstrokes of the hands series he would later paint in England, but full of the same conviction. He signs it for me, and writes: This is a page of history.
Original interview by Jiaqi Kang with thanks to Iris Lang for translation. Photography by Gabriel Bailey. Banner by Jessica Peng. Medium article re-uploaded by Natalie Cheung.
Sine Theta is a creative arts magazine made by and for the Sino diaspora.
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