Chen Qiu: From Hilltop to Drone Verticality

Chen Qlu’s recent practice continues his exploration of the historical and global dimensions of image-making in New China. Treating photography and its derivative imagery as vital pathways for understanding intellectual history, he stages dialogues among his works-Liberation, Re-Presentation / Representation / Proxy, No One, Geopolitics-and a constellation of historical photographs, private archives, and aeronautical components. Within this constellation, the artist constructs an experimental field where history, technology, and visual power converge into a single intertwined route.

Over the past five years, Chen has assembled his image-based works into spatial installations that transform photography into semi-public, semi-declassified information. These spaces echo with the aesthetic reverberations of history’s unfolding, the frictions of moral philosophy, and the stratification of material memory.

Taking the historical paradigm of imagery as a point of departure, Chen Qiu seeks to map an “interactional history” between images and humanity. His inquiry insists that contemporary image production, beyond methodological or formal critique, must remain anchored in the local-probing how visual media forge balances and connections between individuals and collectives. Through this, he endeavors to reveal the evolving discourse of photographic culture in China, and the latent continuities of media that persist across the thresholds of historical change.

The Rehearsal Project

“The Rehearsal Project” is not only a theater space that is both public and private, but also an experimental time for adjusting experience and feedback. As an exploratory artist solo exhibition plan of Taikang Art Museum, it will inherit the tradition of Taikang Space 51m² project and “Sunlight Pavilion Series”, take Taikang Art Museum CBD public space as a new coordinate, continue to promote the presentation and research plan of outstanding artists; continue to promote the exploration of the value construction of Chinese contemporary art subjectivity; continue to accompany the fresh artistic practice to grow together.