 iu Xiaofei, not yet 30 years old, says he always looks to his memory for inspiration, though he is still so young.
This lucky boy, who is now a rising star in the Chinese contemporary art world, has just exhibited a set of installation works entitled, “It’ll soon be Nine O’clock.”
The installation is a room of over 20 square meters, with pale white walls and a dark-green floor. On one wall hangs a clock, below which stands a dark-olive wooden table; on the table is a 19-inch TV set and a table lamp made of tin, which is set upon some yellowing old photographs. The table lamp is turned on, and can you see several beer bottles scattered around the room, as if waiting for their owner.
The owner, you bet, will never come back. It is a scene from the 1970’s that has been swept into the historical torrent, forever and together with the pre-industrialized state-owned factories, old public houses, slow but secure lives and years of material shortage.
When you transfer from the huge construction scenes of densely packed high-rises in Beijing to such a small room, the atmosphere seems frozen in time.
That is the history created by this young artist named Qiu. The wooden table, the clock, the television set, the table lamp and the beer bottles are all sculpted out of fiberglass and reinforced plastic.
In these art pieces, the abstracted “past” is juxtaposed with “today” in the same time and space, to produce a peculiar effect, forcing us to reflect upon what we have experienced and lost in the past 20 years of rapid development and radical changes.
“The past means to me a quiet and serene life, which turns out to be particularly precious today. It is deep in my soul and brings me the long lost tranquility and bliss when I work,” Qiu says.
 Memory constitutes a lingering theme in his art works.
On a warm winter day in December 2006, Qiu Xiaofei was in his studio at the “Rail Ring Art Zone” in suburban Beijing. Slightly thin, he is a young man of fair complexion and medium stature, wearing a punk-fashioned green army coat and a pair of canvas sneakers, smart in a low-key style.
The “Rail Ring Art Zone,” which is adjacent to the 798 arts district, is a testing ground for mini locomotives. Inside the rail rings stand some storehouses, which Qiu, together with some of his fellow artists, rent cheaply. These houses, with high ceilings, bright windows and adequate heating, can serve as residences as well as art studios. As he sits on the sofa, looking at paintings and listening to then trains zoom by, there is a sense of how time plays with the mind.
Ordered at a considerable price (and that appears to be a secret) by some buyer, the installation work “It’ll soon be Nine O’clock” has been packed for delivery here. Art curators and collectors now frequent this art retreat, and enormous business opportunities have arisen from its contemporary art works.
“Now that there are so many opportunities in art market, of course I hope to create more works and exhibit them in more and better exhibitions,” says Qiu, who looks sensible and calm, quite distinct from the image of an angry young artist one might expect him to be.
 Born in 1977, Qiu grew up in Harbin in north China, an area that set the stage for his later art works. “I always remember the red-brick apartment with a wooden floor and my eating meals and playing alone and waiting for my father to return. I also remember the wide streets of Harbin,” he says. His father was a reporter from Heilongjiang Daily, and his mother worked in Beijing. Qiu had a lonely, simple and calm childhood, he says.
In 1988, 11-year-old Qiu went to live with his mother in Beijing. His middle school gave fine arts classes. And later he applied for the high school attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, which accepted students nationally. Though not a particularly talented boy, Qiu increasingly showed his potential edge in art, thanks to a hard life and good opportunities.
Qiu can still vividly recall the first time he went to the Academy’s affiliated school, where the sight of many students playing the guitar and singing on the lawn during the class deeply touched him. And then suddenly the word “freedom” leapt out of the disciplined boring art classes: art is free! Filled with vigor and enthusiasm, he studied hard for two years and succeeded in gaining admission to the affiliated school of the Academy, where he began an imaginative, free life – he could freely paint and play the guitar.
Qiu says he devoted his years in high school to listening to rock n’ roll music. In the 1990s, he was a young punk who angrily pursued his freedom. That was the first time he made a rendezvous with contemporary art. Meanwhile, he also read numerous foreign avant-garde painting books. In an exhibition planned by Fang Fang in 2000, Qiu, who was already a student in No. 3 Studio of the Department of Oil Painting in Central Academy of Fine Arts, exhibited his work characteristic of that period: personal articles filled the space; foods and nails were put together in a refrigerator; and a pink plastic bag slipped over the electric fan. “I believed, then, only that could count as avant-garde,” he says.
After graduation in 2002, Qiu found a job of teaching remedial art classes. He rented a small apartment near the Academy and continued to paint. “I didn’t know what would become of the future, but I felt I should keep on my painting. Many of my teachers and senior college classmates had done work like this,” he says.
Pressures from making a living, competition for a job and money, all changed so quickly that the young man Qiu had lost his edge and passion for anger. Often, he retreated to his tiny room and into his old photo albums, and the pale white hues, the small shops along the streets, the factories, neighbors and acquaintances, the slow, simple and perpetual daily life in the old public houses, touched him all of a sudden. The memories deep in his soul were awakened, and he secured a sense of tranquility.
That’s another world, a world of socialist China in the last century that is being wiped out by a highly urbanized and commercialized society. After a slow-paced childhood, young people born in late 1970’s or early 1980’s were quickly swept into the torrent of a commodity society. They were confronted with material abundance and diverse choices, fierce competition, employment pressure, housing pressure and a life of rapid development. But they lacked social security. They spent their whole adolescence going through the abrupt changes in direction. Feeling excited but confused, they began to reflect on the changes.
Qiu says he was determined to paint something different, something not like an oil painting but a photo album. He chose to paint miniature works of books because of his tiny room. His “Photo Paper” series, all oil paintings of book sizes, copied the photo albums in his memory; with dim hues and childhood scenes, they hung on the walls like old framed photographs. After that series was discovered by the Huanbitang Gallery, Qiu became a contract painter for that gallery and began a career as an artist.
He painted what he could recall from memory: Peace Avenue, factories in the pictorial, the kindergarten, the scene of neighbors gathering to watch television, and the scene of buying sweets at a department store. He also created a work entitled “Distress,” in which a young lad wears a flower wreath symbolic of honor but there is no expression on his face – his emotions have been totally drowned in the future hanging upon his neck.
Qiu is lucky. Almost without waiting, he has caught up with the golden times in the course of contemporary Chinese art. Prices of contemporary Chinese art works have been skyrocketing since 2003,  and the once almost discarded location of “798 Factory” in Beijing has become the sought after center of the Chinese contemporary art world.
Qiu’s art works also found their ways to more and more art exhibitions. He exhibited works in eight exhibitions in 2005, including the “Mahjong: Chinese contemporary Art Works from the Uli Sigg Collection,” at Bern Art Gallery of Switzerland as well as “Up and Down the River: A Retrospective Exhibition of Chinese Oil Paintings” conducted at the National Gallery of China.
“I hope very much, through my painting, to construct a world I know well, a history that has actually influenced me,” Qiu says.
Top Image：Friendship Interview 2005
Image 1：Factory on the Pictorial 2004
Image 2：Physical Jerks 2006
Image 3：Time disappear 2005
Image 4：Police wagon with White sheet iron 2005
Image 5：Narcissus 2005
Image 6：Near 7 O'clock
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