As evidenced by the title of his solo exhibition, Qiu Anxiong is an artist who dwells simultaneously in the past and the present. In “Nostalgia,” Qiu combined the themes of memory and urbanization in a site-specific installation, in which he scrutinized the ghost towns surrounding Chengdu, the results of the Township and Village Enterprises system, an initiative by the Chinese government in the late 1970s that created industry in the countryside in an attempt to stem rural migration. Factories popped up everywhere, but still many young people headed for the cities of Chengdu and Chongqing, leaving their parents behind to tend to their grandchildren and the fields. In the show, Qiu lamented contemporary obsession with materialism and uses the life cycle of the cicada as a metaphor for maturation into more spiritual pursuits.

The exhibition began in the white marble lobby of Bund 18, a strikingly renovated, early 20th-century colonial relic that is now filled with luxury boutiques. Qiu placed his three-meter-long, brown fiberglass Shell of Cicada (2008) in the middle of this ostentatious environment. The back of the shell is split open, revealing a hollow, mottled brown interior. In the exhibition’s narrative, Qiu explains that when the insect loses its shell, what emerges is the “essence of life.” Shedding its material mantle, it flies up to the fourth floor Bund 18 Creative Center to find, according to Qiu, a more spiritual and contemplative space.

As evidence of this flight, viewers entering the fourth-floor space were greeted with an audio track featuring cicadas. Inside the main hall was a series of projections, leaden-hued images of rural landscapes with forests, mountains and fields, which are blighted by roads and factories, the encroachment of industry. Each video flips between two to three different scenes, an image of a factory or a field shot from different angles. Qiu’s images, however, are not shrill indictments against industrialization. Rather, they possess a rare kind of calming and meditative beauty. In Factory (2007), a white building is dwarfed by an imposing mountain; in Field (2007), two peasants rake chaff into a bonfire. Using two to eight minute intervals, Qiu encourages viewers to meditate upon the tranquil scenes, which offer only the slightest suggestion of movement: rustling weeds, a grazing cow lifting its head or a trail of curling smoke.

Qiu said that his motives for filming these ghost towns were archival, to capture something of China’s quickly fading past. At the same time, his work prompts the viewer to consider the problematic effects of materialism and industrialization on the Chinese family structure and the environment. Qiu offers reflection and a focus on a spiritual life as a salve.

- Rebecca Catching