2025.10.15 - 2025.11.28

Chen Qiu: From Hilltop to Drone Verticality

The Rehearsal Project: A Solo Exhibition Series

Duration
October 15 - November 20，2025
Opening hour
Tuesday - Sunday 10:00-17:30
Address
Taikang Art Museum, 1-2F Taikang Art Museum, Building 1, Yard 16, Jinghui Street,Beijing Taikang Group Building
Artist
Chen Qiu
Curator
Xin Yunpeng

Chen Qiu’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.

Other Information

ABOUT CURATOR
Xin Yunpeng

Graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts with a Master’s degree in Art in 2016, Xin Yunpeng has been engaged in contemporary art practice since 2007. He currently lives and works in Beijing. His works mainly take the form of installations, videos, and site-specific projects.
Recent solo exhibitions include The Winds Howl Cannot Silence the Grass (MouMou Space, Beijing, 2024); Multi-Minds (Gravity Art Museum, Beijing, 2023); Simultaneous (de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong, 2022); and Friendship First, Competition Second (C5CNM, Beijing, 2020).
Selected group exhibitions include Zhilan: A Glance in Urban Garden (X Museum, Shanghai, 2024); STUDY II: Natural History, Alternative Knowledge and Deep Learning (ShanghArt, Beijing, 2024); Engaging with the World: Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art Since the Dawn of the 20th Century (Taikang Art Museum, Beijing, 2023); and M+ Sigg Collection: Another Story (M+, Hong Kong, 2023).
ABOUT ARTIST
Chen Qiu

Chen Qiu graduated from the MFA Program at Glasgow School of Art and holds a dual degree in Law and Philosophy from Southeast University. He currently as Associate Editor-in-Chief at Chinese Photography magazine, working and living in Beijing. His work focuses on exploring the “totalizing” practical strategies of contemporary image-making and the historical transformation of image-based experiences. Specifically, he investigates the vestiges of experience in both official and private imagery from the late 20th century, which have been appropriated and obscured by postmodern discourse within the context of China’s local intellectual history. Through his comprehensive engagement across academia, artistic practice, and media, he aims to address the long-overlooked structural role of photography as a foundational component of contemporary visual culture in China.