By Sara Beretta
"Madame" (dir. Qiu Jiongjiong)
Qiu Jiongjiong is an artist who paints and makes films; but more importantly, art for him is a way of life, full of vitality and laughter. The preciousness of his work, aside from being technically accomplished with the brush and lens, lies primary in his own personality and attitude. Surprise, enthusiasm and wonder direct his approach to the world and its actors. Everyone plays a special and unique role on the stage of life, author and the viewer included.
In August UCCA (Ullens Center for Contemporary Art) in Beijing held a retrospective of Qiu’s documentaries, curated by master of indie film Zhang Xianmin, including the première of Qiu’s latest work My Mother’s Rhapsody. Art and life have interplayed in Qiu’s personal history since the beginning: born in 1977 in Sichuan, he grew up among actors (his grandfather was a famous Sichuan Opera performer), and started painting and wandering around the stage since he was a child. He still holds the amazed gaze of the child marveling at (re)telling his family’s history, as an ordinary epic saga in black and white poetry, reconstructing and reshaping memories. With the exceptions of Madame (2010) and A Portrait of Mr. Huang (2009), his documentaries are all about his relatives, playing their own role, making up the “Chatterbox Trilogy”. It would be insufficient to go in depth here with all Qiu’s documentaries, any of them worthy of its own entry. But a precis of his Trilogy could help in beginning to approach and to enjoy his poetry.
