Qiu Xiaofei: Glossolalia, Dance, and the Naked Body

Venus Lau
Qiu Xiaofei is often and not unreasonably called an artist of repetition. One of his earlier
installations, Almost Seven (2004), produced two years after his graduation from the Central
Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), orchestrates a sense of dj vu through the reproduction of a
domestic scene dated t the commencement of Chinas economic reform and opening.
Seemingly drawn from the idealized sets of Jia Zhangkes movie Platform, the installation
takes the form of an assemblage of life-size sculptures made of painted fiberglass. Pieces of
fiberglass are disguised as an old wooden table with a vintage clock above it, all covered with
painterly details including pigment black and white photographs on the tabletop, pretending
to intimacy with a certain personal history. A similar logic and methodology are employed in
Pagoda of the Discarded (2008), in which realistic fiberglass sculptures of toilet bowls and
bathroom sinks are scattered around a gallery like abandoned tombstones.
The rhetoric of repetition in Qiu Xiaofeis artistic practice is a perspective rather than a
groundless comment. Apart from his practice of copying original objects, the general notion
of repetition arises again from a remarkable portion of Qius early realist paintings based on
photo albums pages of obsolete textbooks, abandoned household articles, and antique toys,
most painted from photographs and all bound in collective memory originating from the
period of Qius childhood. Such images are often layered under the corrosive light of what
Jerry Saltz has called the Richter resolution, a deliberate beclouding of a painted image that
makes possible the interrogation of representation writ large. Saltz an other critics find such
gestures inadventurous (1), but in the case of Qiu Xiaofei one might venture that painting
should not be reduced to a dry reproduction of readymade or found photographic images. In
the standard narrative, the invention of the camera lens demarcates modern visibility as
constructed by a tireless, single-eyed perspective, leaving the human eye forced into a
situation of interpassivity. Compared to photorealist painting that minimizes the choice of
colors and abdicates the core of attention to the opacity to the light-and-shadow dialectic, Qiu
pays close attention to narrating through hues and thick materiality.
We Know our Heavy Darkness (2009) presents an image vestured in an opaque multiplicity
of uneven thickness and various shades. The composition of the painting, to be brief, consists
of a woman cutting the hair of a man, the rosiness of the cheeks of both figures resonating
with a cityscape mingling pink and grey tones outside of a window. Speckles of light on hair
oscillate against a dark green tone applied to the window frames. There is a certain
consonance in localized uses of colors but it is restrained to the point that no flat univocality is
formed; instead, differences in intensity conflict like an exchange of fists. Watching TV
(2004) paints a scene drawn from a specific period in Chinese history: in the 1980s the
country saw a surge in the domestic use of television but the visual machine remained a
luxury for most households, so groups of people gathered in houses or stores to enjoy the
limited range of programs, leading to a less intimate viewing experience somewhat closer to
cinematic sociality but lacking the physical dimension of the image. In Qius painting, a splash
of yellow light illuminates a crowd preoccupied by a small screen. Light freezes their faces,
washing away facial features and inserting patches of astonishment. Surprisingly, this light
does not misappropriate the depth of the entire picture, but rather subsides when it meets the
green of the walls and the red of several outfits. Ruins (2007), on the other hand, consists of
building blocks aggrandized to the scale of human architecture, its painted wooden blocks
amplifying an infantile experience for a specific generation of the Chinese experience: huge

wooden cubes are painted with abstract windows, doors, and brick wall patterns. Questioned
about the sheer size of the installation, the artist notes a relationship between the intimidating
dimensions of the sculpture and the political metanarratives of the revolutionary era.
Unlike his mentor, Qiu Xiaofei paints pictures of the past. Liu Xiaodong, elder statesman of
Chinese realist painting, focuses on painting contemporary social situations: naked workers
sitting in a truck with a gasoline tank in the 1990s, for instance, or relocated residents living
near the Three Gorges Dam in over the past decade. Although the notion of political currency
has been influential for Qiu, it is memory--both as empirical experience and as collective deja
vu--that frames the tonal context of his painting, seducing those who would borrow a platform
on which collective memory might unfurl. Passed social scenes, nostalgic warm lights, old
objects; the resulting connotations of memory in his work is linked to a divergent reading of
reproduction. Our concept of repetition in memory can be traced to ancient Greece, where
memory was thought of as eikon, a mental image. For Plato, the mechanism of memory
production is analogous to the wax tablet on which physical pressure in the specific forms of
imaginary movements like imprinting are applied.
Such notions of memory as carbon paper dominate our contemporary culture. There is a
Chinese idiom that literally translates as the senses stamping or etching on the sea of the
mind, hinting at a conception of pressing and replicating as in the wax tablet metaphor, such
that memory is created to play the role of a replica of historical truth. Honesty becomes a
standard obligation of memory. In a country where historical narratives have long been
dominated by the leitmotif of the ruling regime, intellectuals--public or otherwise--are
charged with the important mission of revealing the truth of history through recollection
and representation, tasked with visualizing silence. This burden weighs most heavily on artists
of visual production, including visual artists and film directors. Born in the 1970s, Qiu more
or less witnessed the key turning points of post-revolutionary China, particularly the
economic Reform and Opening period advocated by Deng Xiaoping. Instead of picturing
crucial historical moments like the oft-illustrated scene of Mao Zedong delivering his speech
at the gate tower of Tiananmen outside the Forbidden City as captured by the single eye of
the lens, Qiu instead paints the visual traces of trivial incidents in times gone by. Lacking a
preconceived plan to present himself as a representative of certain communities, the artist
paints through an introspective, handmade process based on personal experience. If his
studio practice is definitively not a revival of the aura accumulated through time, labor, and
craftsmanship, it certainly involves a gesture of resistance against forgetting. Working across
the canvas, this is a therapeutical treatment for historical anxieties.
Along his identity as an artist, Qiu Xiaofei is occasionally also a writer. Most of his writings are
short stories with a word count of around 400 Chinese characters, densely succinct and
reminding readers of the palm-of-the-hand stories popularized by Nobel-laureate novelist
Yasunari Kawabata. Among a handful of his unpublished short stories, one of Qius pieces,
titled Rat, translates a personal dream to the linguistic surface:
I had a dream one day. It brought me back to the small home of my childhood. The paint on
the walls was peeling off, flakes spattered the floor. My toys and belongings were embedded in
the walls. I exerted myself to dig them out with my fingers. Then the sun was setting, its light
sprinkling on the floor. ... I have produced a number of paintings involving my childhood
memories. I enjoy immersing myself in faded time. (2)

This dream tellingly involves the physical motion of excavation beneath the surface of verbal
consciousness, an act that may serve as a metaphor for the artists ongoing practice of making
images and sculptures of vintage toys and other object that appear brined in the stagnancy of
the obsolete. Qiu Xiaofei once confessed that this repetitive practice of painting old objects
alleviated his anxiety. The series Art consists of a range of small, semi-monochrome paintings
of the brittle pages of old textbooks full of homework exercises related to the art education of
the artists childhood. One, for instance, depicts a yellowed book page dominated by a thin
black circle with a question below the shape: What can this circle turn into through
drawing? Similar portraits of old textbooks are also found in the series Study, albeit with
Chinese characters replaced with Cyrillic lettering and portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Further
explicit links between Qius ongoing practice and his childhood are revealed in early fiberglass
sculptures of humble size in the forms of a red toy bus and a toy piano for infants.
Qiu Xiaofei signifies the gaze at a distance of recollection through past experience, manifested
not only through blurriness as a visualization of distance but also through the gradual rippling
of fabricated traces of aging on objects. Houhai (2004), for instance, is a small painting of a
framed photograph or print of the titular lake at the center of old Beijing. In this piece, the
artist paints not only the photograph of a scenic view with crisp light over the lake, but also
yellowish water stains around the posited image, shades of which graduate in a concentric
pattern resembling the growth of tree rings in sharp contrast with the photographic image
that captures and preserves a specific moment in time. Houhai is a prime example of Qius use
of color to rehearse and relocate an imagined temporality from one surface to another (in this
case, from photo paper to canvas). A similar methodology is applied in Worn Out Notepad
with Water Stains (2003), Diary (2004), and Pyongyang (2004).
Psychoanalysis contributes to a common interpretation of Qiu Xiaofeis early painting. The
Lacanian reading of the work is not uncommon in China, certainly a byproduct of the turn in
Chinese academia that has seen the publication of a rash of translations of Slavoj Zizek,
Jacques, Lacan, and others. In addition, the linguistic dimension of psychoanalysis makes for
a convenient tool in examining disciplines of signification and semiotics, covering most image
practice but in particular Chinese painting. Qius emphasis on childhood experience and
encountered visual surfaces as delineated in a particular finish marks an introspective process
that traces back to an early mental stage. Given the circumstances, then, it is no surprise that
the his works has been trapped in an explication of the so-called L-scheme, Lacans graph of
subject, object, and desire. Critic Bao Dong, for instance, makes extensive reference to
Lacanian theory in an essay printed in the catalogue for Qiu Xiaofeis 2010 solo exhibition.
Assertions of the artists zealous approach to psychoanalysis have followed even in the mass
media (3), although Qiu clarifies that he has only had very limited exposure to Lacanian texts.
Psychoanalysis theorizes subjectivation, producing a discourse that deconstructs the analogy
between unconsciousness and linguistic architecture. Its universality allows full coverage of
many subjects, making it broadly applicable to all human behavior. Rather than borrowing
the concepts of psychoanalysis as an epistemological undertone, however, Qiu Xiaofeis
connection with psychoanalysis and clinical psychiatry is based more on his personal
experience: one of his close relatives suffers from a mental disorder that necessitates various
clinical treatments. Three Thousand Feet (2010), an oil painting on canvas, appears as a
symptom of the this empirical experience of pathology. The periphery of the composition is
painted pink, enclosing a space in which several topless men sit in front of an overly blue
waterfall with their hands in their laps, the upper halves of their faces hidden behind

idiosyncratic spectacles with dark lenses. Qiu has explained the function of these optical
devices: his relative is encumbered with an endless imagination of open, unknown,
unnamed, unexplainable, visible yet tangible objects, including geometric Platonic solids that
often appear (4). The patient is thus dragged into a swamp of hypersensitivity to the possible
connotations of objects lacking proper nouns, visible forms that are as yet unnamed. She
remains prisoner in a dungeon of obsession, a feedback loop producing the illusion that all
such unnamed shapes are part of a conspiracy directed against her. Qiu Xiaofei regards these
shapes as vessels of the mind, a reserve for non-rational thinking. Visualizing the processes of
the mind does not negate the links between geometric shapes and reason; different thoughtpatterns are not necessarily the consequence of sensitivity or sensibility outside of rational
thought. In fact, the obsession is based on an excessive pursuit of rationality and logic. For
Qiu, this is a deadlock that cannot be transcended by thought.
Although the trifecta of psychoanalysis, memory, and representation (as a dialectic fixated on
the dichotomy of original and copy) plays a justified role in the reading of Qius work, it also
circumscribes possible discursive productions of his practice. Psychoanalysis and the
representation of memory share certain qualities in common: both are structured in a onedimensional manner, intended to pursue a counterpart stemming out from a single
perspective. In addition, they both share a fervor for historicity: memory is always in search of
an alleged linear historical truth--either that or the glitter of personal or collective history that
once burnished the realm of senses--while psychoanalysis is an archaeology of subjectivity
based on a medical gaze that encompasses exchanged speech acts in a linguistic system. To a
certain extent, these notions of representation are easily compared to the narratives of
repetition and replication. In the present moment, where hyperreality has been advocated for
almost twenty years and Borgess imagery of the map as the territory has become a cliche, it
would be awkward to accuse an artist of making a replica of an object that is mass-produced
to begin with. Building blocks, dusty photos, covers of abandoned textbooks--these objects are
neither replicas nor tricks intended to resist the ubiquitous mechanical reproduction of
representation.
If Qiu Xiaofeis paintings were nothing more than dreamy scenes overexposed on the canvas,
he would indeed be destined to be ceaselessly analyzed viewers through paintings seen as
symptoms. Through an anatomy of the artists visual discourse, viewers would expect to
exhume Oedipus and the discourse of the other through traces of the artists embodied
thought as manifested on the tip of his brush. Psychoanalysis enthusiasts will march back to a
spot marking the mental genesis of the artist characterized by a holy trinity structure of the
nuclear family, or else will locate a perversion of the inward-outward cathexis of ego-libido
and object-libido as a cartographic construction of adolescent sexual repression. These
readings constitute a simplified and effortless solution, an established theoretical and
paradigmatic framework by which repetition recreates new memories to cover the old with a
new body of painterly thought. In reality, however, Qius work far and away transcends the
Freudian case study, an excess that is particularly explicit in his recent work.
Either by conscious determination or contingency, Qiu Xiaofei has embraced a rupture from
his obsession with memory and objects as containers of nostalgia by 2010 at the latest. Of
course, Qiu has not become completely detached from realist painting and the blurry gaze, nor
has he departed radically from the images and objects he encountered in childhood. Instead,
one may find a transformation engendered by the dead knots he refers to with regard to her
relatives mental symptoms. These knots are materialized in Qius painting in the form of

mysterious, vibrant geometric shapes that drift across his painterly planes. Such shapes
usually invade his compositions as visual discontinuity through texture, color, and
perspective, breaking the dominant linear perspectives and dominant narratives of the
paintings with colorful murkiness. These shapes are their own shadows, manifesting an
opacity that blocks the possibility of apprehensive totality.
Qiu Xiaofeis solo exhibition Point of No Return in 2010 found his work of that time
differing greatly from his practice of five years prior, most notably in the random geometric
shapes of spheres, pyramids, cubes, and cylinders of various colors making their appearance
for the first time. These new visual components recall the logical deadlocks the artist had
brought up before, particularly in the title of the exhibition, derived from Record of the
Classification of Ancient Painting. Believed to be the earliest theoretical monograph
dedicated to Chinese painting and its criticism, the text was written by Xie He, a painter and
theorist who lived across the dynasties of Qi (479-502) and Liang (502-557). Xie describes the
devotion of painter Gu Junzhi with an anecdote: Gu usually constructs a towering building as
his atelier. During days marked with warm sultriness, he idles his brushes; the brush is only
infused with ink on days of clear and crisp weather. When he sets his foot in the studio, there
follows the removal of the ladder by which he ascends. His wife rarely sees his face. The story
alludes to the contemplation of and devotion to painting per se, as opposed to a flustered
wandering upon imaginary staircases between reality and simulacrum. In his 2010 exhibition,
Qiu Xiaofei visualizes the process of thinking the unthinkable via geometric shapes, investing
attention in rethinking the unity internal to painting as image and object by dislocating these
shapes across each composition. By negotiating the concept of totality in painting, the burden
of historical or remembered representation is left behind.
The background of Stiffness of the Nimbs (2009) is conquered by a black non-uniformity that
endures the juxtaposition of a red cube and an inversed Niemeyer-esque structure, albeit
steering away from straight lines and right angles in adoration of the curving surface. Below
these objects is placed a line-drawing of a human figure lying in bed. The incongruity and
disharmony of the objects depicted leads to a focus on the background as unifying force. In a
scientific context, black is the epitome of invisibility; in an artistic context, on the other hand,
black is actually positioned on the far end of the grayscale. Scientific narratives presuppose
that the dialectic between black and white is a war between two absences of visibility: white
reflects all light while black absorbs all light, distilling the impossibility of vision into a clear
opposition. Black and white in art, by contrast, are not polar absolutes, but rather endure a
process of endless multiplication between one another (4). In Stiffness of the Limbs, the
dissension of the black represents an astatic motion along the grayscale. Instead of a smooth,
uniform monochrome, Qiu applies uneven layers of paint to accelerate the blacks collision
against the light, granting the dark color a restlessness rather than the status of an obedient
backdrop. Across the tension between a human figure deep in sleep and a building suspended
in surreal levitation, the visual structure of the painting demonstrates similarities parallel to
the explanatory figure of the camera mechanism, potentially rendering the dreamy picture a
classic case study of psychoanalysis and memory. This easy dependence on an established
epistemological system, however, is again subverted, lacerated by the magenta cube that
disrupts these two terms by reflecting light coming from nowhere. It is an uncanny cry
snipping the relationality of the prospective analytical project.
Similar geometric shapes have gradually come to appear across the artists recent work. In
Gloom of Old Age (2010), for instance, a human figure with his face immersed in the closure

of a mysterious, seashell is juxtaposed with a lopapeysa-style visual algorithm of seemingly

random shapes. Cubes and cylinders of warm tones also intrude on the composition of To Call
a Stag a Horse (2010), which depicts the figure of a soldier positioned in the center of a flat
blue square ringed with turbulent brushstrokes in the background. Geometric shapes offer an
intense gesture of increasing the depth of the painting: in State-Owned Objects (2010), a
domestic setting is inundated with a cold greyish tone, consisting of an assemblage of tables,
radio, and chairs in the dominant hue, the totality of which is corroded by a pale orange that
trespasses into the scene. The frequent appearance of these shapes may lead to concern that
Qiu Xiaofei seeks to created visual symbols prepared for mass-production in his work to
come, as so many artists did in the early decades of Chinese contemporary art. Qius
geometric figures, however, are far from pictorial, recognizable incarnations of abstract
signifiers like Chineseness. To the contrary, they function as spacings in which the artist
examines the unity of spatial structure in realist painting with voids as shapes, deconstructing
the possible completeness of visual narrative.
Renaissance architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi rediscovered linear perspective in the
early 1400s, a moment that laid the foundation for the development of painting as a perfect
illusion of spatial depth on a flat surface. As a geometric theory closely tied to the
Renaissance-era focus on the humanities, linear perspectives is a cartography demarcated by
finitude, namely human finitude. Through the deposition of vanishing points, the horizon,
and orthogonals, a spatiality based on a single fixed spectator point implied that only limited
light can travel to the eyes of the viewer, unlike the omnipresence of divinity. The boundary of
visibility to the human eye is marked by the vanishing points, suggesting that only a portion of
reality can be seen on a flat surface--the archetype of the trompe-l'il. Linear perspective
establishes a self-sufficient delusion by which spectators can indulge in idleness at a limited
slice of visual multitude; it constructs a map of the distribution of the sensible in terms of
what is supposed to be seen and what is exiled as noise outside of sensibility.
Qiu Xiaofei churns out geometric solids to upset the harmony of finitude produces through
linear perspective. The two figures shaking hands in the painting Together Again (2009)
share the same sphere of perspective and lighting, positioned on the same grounding such
that their visible elements are able to engage in discursive exchange. Their faces, however, are
absent, their facial expressions obscured by the crude intrusion of two red hexagonal prisms.
This intervention is transformed into a certain form of trompe-l'il, where multiple planes of
linear perspective coexist on the same flat surface. If the Richter resolution partially present
here is a murmur protesting the precision of the single-eyed mechanical gaze, and if the
imitation of old photographs and outmoded objects constitutes an exchange of gazes of
consternation between the painter and his experience, then Qiu Xiaofeis words and geometric
shapes are building blocks for a fence warding off comprehension and containment. Here and
elsewhere, they institute a fissure on the painting as an object, building up to a form of
glossolalia.
Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, is defined by its chain of meaningless syllables smoothly
swimming in its own fluidity. This act of incomprehensible vocalizing occupies a unique
position in the history of Christianity: regarded as an epiphany of the omnipresent divinity,
who is capable of viewing time and space from multiple perspectives, many cases of
glossolalia have been perceived as linguistic miracles granted by the Holy Spirit. For some
believers, glossolalia is the word of God untranslated. The Cessationist school holds that the
generosity of the Holy Spirit--glossolalia included--vanished in the early years of Christianity.

For such adherents, contemporary glossolalia is thus mere gibberish. Ultimately, the concept
has transcended the periphery of religion and theology and has become an object for linguistic
investigation. Linguists generally also subsume under the category of glossolalia the sounds of
babbling in infancy and the flow of somniloquence in sleep. Artists, including the Futurists
and the Dadaists, have utilized the inconceivable sounds of glossolalia as rough gems perfused
with mythical objecthood bridging the literary and musical constitution, resulting in art forms
like sound poetry. In certain cases the religious connotation grants glossolalia the sagacity of
the oracle, as wisdom separated from the person speaking its words of wisdom. As a speech
act, glossolalia is a flux that can be divided up to the level of the phoneme. French philosopher
Michel de Certeau dedicated an essay to this linguistic behavior, the text of which opens with
common definition of glossolalia: a quasi-language lacking linguistic structure. Here it
appears as an audio facade, pure form or skin existing in an absence of content. Scholars
describe glossolalia as a trompe-l'oreille. In an imaginary flat sound vortex, an illusion of
fathomable dimension is constructed. It is an art of speech manipulated by illusion (6).
The knotty, recurring visual elements in Qiu Xiaofeis recent paintings--text and geometric
shapes that upset the picture and, the gruesome war between conflicting textures that
follows--provide a perceptive experience mingled with such inconceivable voids that hit home
like the experience of chewing on small stones in food. State-Owned Object explicates the
source of its image with its very title: the artists memories of the early stages of the economic
reform that provided the backdrop to his childhood. A tone of wintery, overcast grey piles up
to form a landscape of cold color in which small table and two chairs stand as the core of an
everyday scene lacking any temperature. A visual and textural topography is established with
layering of only very limited colors. The intent is to equate the mode of painting with a flat
replica of history, an effort that is destined to disintegrate with the arrival of a pastel orange
cone situated right in the center. Glossolalia is here no longer a twin of the voice of reason,
disrupting the signification of form and sound. Instead, glossolalia appears as a linguistic or
semantic system in which obsessive, tireless pursuits--either theological or linguistic--for
meaning end in failure.
Homogenous human figures in uniforms resembling the androgynous athletic suits of Chinese
primary, middle, high school students appear across the composition of The Propagating
Madman (2009). Similar in facial expression and in the conformity of their outfits, these
figures are clearly linked through a vague opacity that is broken up only by a circular patch of
red paint that is out of place and out of scale, diverging greatly from the remainder of the
composition. Showing its face literally out of the blue, this shape helps create a clamor of
visual voices that breaks up the field of statements and transforms the work of the painting
into glossolalia, functioning as an opera of enunciation on the stage of semiotic exchange (7).
The red circle is the abjection of meaning.
Russian symbolist poet and literary critic Andrei Belys title Glossolalia was written in 1917
and published in 1922. Subtitled A Poem about Sound, it demonstrates the writers
adherence to the importance of sound and musicality in the audio aspects of literature. In the
preface, Bely states his belief in the mysteries residing in language, explaining that the book
attempts to present sound themes that implant fantasies of sound images in the reader or
listener. Bely notes a social situation in which one may not able to hear the semiotic content of
a speakers speech, where comprehension of the lost sounds is ultimately attained by the
perception of gesture delivered by the subject of enunciation. He concludes with a comparison
of language systems to the mechanisms of precipitation and storm systems, where thunders

of sounds and instantaneous lightning bolts of meaning are cloaked by metaphorical clouds
(8).
Bely sees glossolalia as improvisation with sound themes (9) behind the figurative
subjectivity of his improvisations, concealed by something beyond the figurative, nonsubjective root (10). He focuses on the corporeal aspects of the vocal act by asserting that all
motions of the tongue belong to the choreography of an armless dancer twirling with light and
air like a gaseous veil (11). The poet writes of a cosmology in which the spirits come down in
eurythmy, the art of movement devised by Rudolf Steiner comprised of gestures related to
rhythm, the sound of speech, and the tonality of music. Bely even attached illustrations
pairing different sounds with the dance-like movements of the tongue. Seeing eurythmy as a
way to open the abyss in ourselves, Bely ushers the way through the passage from musicality
of glossolalia to mystical experience, much like the tunneling between colors and sounds in
his novel Petersburg.
Belys use of dance as metaphor is far from unique, so it should not be surprising that Alain
Badiou has adopted the same imagery for the gesturality of thought, as the connotations of
dance seem to constitute suitable imagery for the explicitation of the liberation of thinking
from rigidity. Unlike Bely, who actually relates dance with the bodily movements of the
tongue, Badiou links dance with the motions of thought. Both writers, however, relate their
work to the Zarathustra complex of Friedrich Nietzsche. Zarathustra, the protagonist of the
German philosophers story, is a Zoroastrian prophet who functions as a mouthpiece through
which the philosopher announces the death of God. The prophet travels with a serpent and an
eagle, the former symbolizing the eternal return and the latter signifying the notion of the
Overman. Bely dissects the sound of Zarathustras name such that the meanings of the
morning star and the solar gaze are derived from its syllables. This gesture, of images induced
by sound, concludes that Zarathustra is the one with rays outstretched to everything from the
spiritual light-heat to the soul (12). The imagery of light is derived from the flesh of the
armless dancer--the tongue--which sets an intangible obstacle between sound and the
signification system. Its dance blossoms out from its own physicality, while the tongue
transcends the order of language and the reserve of sounds with its own flesh.
Although this might be a metanarrative related primarily to thought, allegories of physicality
are also employed to illustrate the dance of thinking. Here Badiou follows the stance of
Nietzsche-as-Zarathustra by taking up the hatchet against the gravity of spirit (13),
introducing an aerial grace whereby verticality and attraction enter the dancing body and
allow it to manifest a paradoxical possibility where the earth and the air change positions and
orientations (14). This Nietzschean prologue prefigures a dance of levitation and verticality at
a certain height. Dance, as a body before body (15), is linked with impressions of birds and
children for its forgetfulness of its own weight (16). The core trait of dance, Badiou concludes,
is airiness, symbolizing the light breath of the earth and the body channeled by dance and
allowing their reversal (17).
As an empirical real and as imagery for thought, dance points to a mobility that is left as an
uninscribed externality (18). Dance is a centripetalism in which movement never deviates
from itself. In this sense dance defines itself via negativity, showing its restraint in the
movements that belong to it, as elements that are otherwise ineffective or repressed only
manifest in movement. People are sometimes manipulated by various unconstrained
impulses, the physical drives, but dance is an exception to this vulgarity in Nietzsches terms--

an incapacity to resist bodily entreaty. Dance demonstrates a contrast with a freefall that
follows vulgarity, which, in a sense, coincides with the barbaric direct appeal to the senses of
Kantian kitsch (19). Dance is an endless capriole of resistance to the bodily impulses. In a
similar way, the excess of the symbolic system in Qiu Xiaofeis painting does not render his
paintings a product of abstract art. It is not an output of bodily movement driven by the urge
of emotional expression, but rather remains figurative of this very excess of signification.
Three Thousand Feet dances on its restraints. The tinge of a brownish line, mirroring a fold of
paper, drives its way fully across the painterly surface at a roughly horizontal attitude of
inclination. This inspired addition is ostensibly the continuation of Qiu Xiaofeis personal
interest in painting the surfaces of vintage printed matter, particularly debilitated textbooks.
On the other hand, it also stands as a painterly visualization of the mutually exclusive qualities
of the canvas, a Borromean knot that ties together the eternal return of hypersensibility and
the steadfast pursuit of an absent logic. The line is a figure of negativity, of impossibility that
spins away from the drag of reduction to human emotions while at the same time breaking
the paintings unity as an image by raising the contradiction of the qualities of the medium.
Here, Qiu accelerates the centripetal motion of painting into itself rather than connecting to
other signifiers in a visual story.
The lightness Badiou observes in dance, too, comes in the form of an oxymoron: he presents a
principle of slowness with crisp speed, such that what takes place is indiscernible with its
restraints (20). This paradox sounds deliberately mystifying, and there is more confusion to
come: Badiou lays out a set of paradoxical dialectics paralleling the motions of dance in two
directions, spanning both the gravity of spirit and the levitation of body and thought. Similar
dichotomies--virtual and actual, gestural and non-gestural--are elaborated in dance. In
contrast to the common view of dance that focuses on physical motion, Badiou raises the
notion that dance is a virtual movement in which slowness is hidden in the actual corporeal
maneuver (21).
When dance takes place there emerges a virtual non-place, a see-saw that struggles between
the actual and virtual, movement and immanent restraints, leaving dance in a position of
indecision that Badiou relates to his core concept--the event. In the occurrence of motions and
non-space, dance resides in a chaotic territory where its own appearance and disappearance
are indiscernible. In the face of dance, construed here as the event, naming is the only way to
nail down the hovering instability of the event--to count something as one. Inspired by
mathematics, Badious counting-as-one is a structural operation making consistent
multiplicity thinkable, conferring plurality into a unitary whole. In order to count something
as One, a metastructure must be involved to designate a totality to the potential this One.
Counting-as-one creates a situation whose signified structure must be redoubled in the
symbolic network of signifiers (22). This redoubling easily finds a parallel structure with Qiu
Xiaofeis early realist painting, where a reference to a personal or collective historical is
enframed in the work alongside narratives of light as perspective. A situation is a "counted as
One" , which is, when a multiplicity is identified by its symbolic structure, while the event is a
rupture of this appearance in discernability.Dance ultimately points to the thought as an
event; before a thought is named, the still-illegible name is its veritable disappearance (23).
Without the shelter of the nominal act, it is doomed to vanish. Playing with time in space is
the task of dance, building a singular time based on nominal fixation (24).
The same impulse to name is implied in Qiu Xiaofeis recent painting. A Struggle for Size
(2009) finds its left corner drenched in a viscous thickness of pink pigment, while the same

color fills the remainder of the background in a multiplicity of lighter shades. The title, written
out in Chinese text, rests to one side of the composition, adjacent to a faceless human figure
depicted via line drawing. Three-dimensional shapes in bright ruby, including a cube, a
hexagonal prism, and a sphere, hover over the figure. This plurality of shapes proposes a
potential comparison that resonates with the title, but the shapes are, in fact, not drastically
different in size. If there is a struggle for largeness, it is hardly a vehement one. Without the
hint of the title, one would find it elusive to name the shapes in the composition, leaving them
in an eternal dance at the edge of signification.
Confronted by an unnamed, ineffable object, the viewer also encounters the immanence of
naming. In the face of images that cannot be subsumed by the signification system--the
nominal dispositif--we are traumatized by a chasm. The totality of the image is not
accommodated in the framing of physical qualities; it is a virtual site like the cosmology of
some ancient Asian culture, delineating the spherical firmament arching above the flat surface
of the land. Celestial bodies glide along the sky in its orbit, this circulation endorsing the basis
of the calendar as well as the profanity of quantitative time. Stars are minute apertures that
uncork the lights outside the earth, beyond the temporal order and human recognition, like
the light in the last chapter of Divine Comedy. There, the chosen speakers themselves
constitute an opening transmitting the words of God, or releasing it to splash down into the
great depth of unconsciousness. Back in Qiu Xiaofeis painting, the cylinders and cones
remain perceivable, just as glossolalia is derived from physical sounds in the conscious
language of its unknowing speaker.
The physical frame of the painting is not a promise for a priori totality; conflicts can continue
to exist within the frame. Badiou links silence with dance, which is itself always hand in hand
with music; the nominal absence induced by dance as a metaphor for thought is superseded
by silence. Qiu Xiaofei reveals light from outside the confinement of social and symbolic
relations through an urge to name with geometric shapes, which always bring the efforts of
naming to silence. Qius painting Rafters (2009) presents an apocalyptic landscape comprised
of deserted farmland in cold, alternating tones of gray, brown, and pale green, with dead trees
standing over it. The sky stirs with turbulence of brownish orange and sandy white hues,
patches of different colors that build an abstracted distant view. From afar, the scene may be
based on an imaginary urban landscape, or perhaps simply abstraction in which some roughly
angular structure reveals only half of its face. Several small perspective cubes are drawn in
thin orange lines, disconnected from the perspectives of a normal doomsday vision. These
cubes are often seen in studio art textbooks as paradigms for sketching practice, calling to
mind a bodily singularity devoid of meaning. In this landscape, a painting of devastation,
these signifiers of absent meaning add extra light from outside the world of the semiotic
perspective grid. The dance and glossolalia of geometric shapes and talismanic words hover in
an absence of register and a prism of perspectives, all serving to muddle the visual narrative of
the painting and, ultimately, break up the content of the presupposed totality of the picture.
Opacity recurs in this body of work via the imaginary vector of clear, transparent light
traveling through the canvas.
Where Bely compares glossolalia with poetry, Badiou extracts six principles of dance--which
he opposes to theater--from the literary works of Stphane Mallarm. They are: the obligation
of space; the anonymity of the body; the effaced omnipresence of the sexes; the subtraction
from the self; nakedness; and the absolute gaze. The shifting connections between Qiu
Xiaofeis visual production and the traumatic experience of signification reverberates strongly

in some of these theses proposed on dance (25). As an art form constrained by space, dance
signifies a spacing of thought. Dance is a site devoid of figurative ornament, requesting only
space or spacing (26). The dancing body is anonymous when in motion: unlike theater,
which is devoted to imitation and playing out an act of naming (27) and roleplaying, the
dancing body is not someone. To the contrary, it involves impersonal subjects. It is an
emblem that opposes imitation and expression (28). No depiction can be found it it. The
dancing body does not express any kind of interiority (29), for it is interiority per se in that
it takes place totally on the surface, as a visibly restrained intensity (30). Dance in Qius
painting is manifested not only by the disposition of the mysterious shapes that discontinue
the totality of linear perspective and visual narrative, but also by the opacity brought by a
kaleidoscopic battle of brushstrokes. The seven-meter long painting Desolate Wood (2010)-Qius largest--is centered on a woman depicted in black and white, accompanied by a number
of dark green triangular shapes looking like trees, as indicated by the title. A dense flock of
horizontal brushstrokes of different lengths erodes the picture from the periphery, not only
disturbing the composition with opacity but also suspending the figurative elements in the
picture from the spirit of gravity exuded by the female figure. In her desolate dance, this
cutting of the ties of the gravity of linear perspective occurs alongside the disappearance of
any connection with other signifiers in the same painterly surface.
The dancer does not dance (31); the statement appears overly provocative. Derived from
Mallarms conception of the poem set free of any scribes apparatus (32), dance is also
referred to as an uninscribed poem. The reference is consistently paradoxical: dance without
a dance, or dance undanced (33). There is a subtractive dimension where thought pulls
away from pre-existing knowledge precisely at the point of an evental surge. Meandering back
to the point of memory and forgetfulness at the beginning of the text, one finds not only that
the body forgets gravity in its leap but also that a dancer must not know the dance, allowing
there to unfurl the full gesturality of indecision based on a knowledge traversed as null. The
dancer must forget this knowledge altogether in order to dance; the dancing body is one
subtracted from the knowledge of the body, a body of disclosure (34).
In comparison with the demand for silence, nakedness is one of the theses on dance that may
appear more palatable. In tandem with the impersonality of the dancer, the nakedness of the
dancing body involves a detachment from identity, a non-relationality that relates only to
itself in the nudity of its emergence (35). The gaze cast on a dancing body is the absolute
and fulgurant (36) gaze of a voyeur, albeit not necessarily the singular gaze of desire
manifested in Nietzsches vulgarity. If dance is a subtraction from all relations, then theater is
an excess that builds relations in an enclosure.
Extremely light shades of gray in Thing of the Past (2009) construct a construction scene in
which objects in motion are delineated: a horse drags a wooden log, workers finish the
incomplete roof of a new house, and people pass architectural materials through windows.
These objects also experience another form of motion: their contours are in the process of
dissolving into a backdrop of an ever lighter gray. Scrawled over the image is the line, At her
final place of residence, she points out to me where the black traces are, a complete sentence
that nevertheless provides only limited clues in terms of its relation to the visual narrative.
Although not as extreme as Noam Chomskys infamous exemplar of a grammatically correct
sentence that can render no meaning or too many meanings, Colorless green ideas sleep
furiously, the text here is attached to the picture through a semantic breach. Two brown,
cocoon-like shapes transcend the harmonic totality of the image built through the fixed gaze

of linear perspective. In this case, the additional voice of the texts and the cocoon-shapes add
up to nothing more than a scream outside the symbolization process, locking the other visual
elements in the hold of totality. One find here another example of glossolalia: the somatic
quality of the tongue stresses the act of saying, but not the modality of communication.
In contact with both glossolalia and dance of images, we are reminded of the symptom of
over-rationalization experienced by Qiu Xiaofeis relative, as we too face the irresistible urge
to drag down these shapes from their dance and make sense of it all by linking them with
other symbols in the network of language. Is the effort of a downward movement toward
language doomed from the outset? Are the other voices the dead knots in Qiu Xiaofeis
mind? :ooking at the structural emptiness of Qius sometimes picturesque compositions,
psychoanalysis may not be the most exhilarating discursive dispositif to work with. Instead,
we may find constructive the production of a narrative parallel to the linguistic architecture
reflected in that discipline. This exploration should not adopt the form of hermeneutics
applied to humanist literary scholarship, nor should it represent a modernist dive into the
depths of the soul. In the summer of 1936, a man sat in an art space in London in a heavy
diving suit and metal helmet. Efforts to scrutinize his facial expression behind the small
circular window of the helmet were doomed to fail, for very little light made its way through
the small glass opening. The occasion was the Surrealist International Exhibition organized by
Andre Breton, Man Ray, David Gascoyne, and Humphrey Jennings, among others, and the
artist i the diving suit was Salvador Dali, on the edge of suffocation during the performance of
his delivery of the speech Fantmes paranoiaques authentiques. This body of deep-sea
equipment belongs to a metaphor rendered too explicit to allude to anything other than the
artists intention to strike into the supposed depth of consciousness.
As a founder of Surrealism, Dali was deeply influenced by Sigmund Freud, whose research
was seen to have institutionalized the possibility of self-interpretation. The performance of
1936, rather than a mere rhetorical variation, was a theater of Dionysian intoxication and
ecstasy initiated by the death drive. If the artist had actually succeeded in touring the
submerged, abysmal depths of mind, he would have found not the solid lucidity of David
Hockneys swimming pool, but rather a smothering, traumatic experience--perhaps the same
one that almost physically killed Dali that day. When one attempts to force himself/herself
into the depths of visual glossolalia or try to pull the dancing thoughts back into the orbit of
rational gravity, he or she must remember that the lack of interiority to these ephemeral flows
is only a portal to the real, shedding light from outside of symbolization and leading one to
plunge into the ocean of the trauma of the Real, where the thing (das ding) preys.
In a parallel logic, the attempts to diagnose Qiu Xiaofeis body of paintings--either through
psychoanalysis or probes into historical scar literature--are destined to fail. Rather than
framing a replica of some mental landscape or a historical etching of the senses, Qius painting
shows a constellation of voids and excess dancing away from the settlement of narrative
unitary. These paintings always reveal their events and the events they contain--the localized
portions of their qualities manifested as ultimate alterity. The interpretive effort of following
the undulating visual elements in his paintings will go unrequited, just as Qius experience of
mental illness will be forever guessing the intent of floating geometric shapes. Perpetual
centripetal motion, moving away from the non-existent fixed signified, will turn out to be
suffocating.
Endnotes:

(1) Jerry Saltz, The Richter Resolution, The Village Voice, 2 Mar 2004.
(2) Qiu Xiaofei, The Rat, Unpublished story of the artist, 2006
(3) The Wall Street Journal, Chinese edition, 4 Sep 2012.
(4) Drawn from the personal correspondence between the writer and the artist.
(5) Sean Cubitt, Three Theses on Black and White, 9 May 2010,
http://seancubitt.blogspot.hk/search?q=black
(6) Michel de Certeau, Vocal Utopias: Glossolalia, Representations 56, Autumn 1996. 31.
(7) Ibid. 30.
(8) Andrei Bely, Glossolalia: A Poem about Sound, trans. Thomas R. Beyer Jr., 2001)
(9) Ibid. Preface.
(10) Ibid.
(11) Ibid. 4.
(12) Ibid. 40.
(13) Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano, California: Stanford
University Press, 2005. 57.
(14) Ibid. 58.
(15) Ibid. 57.
(16) Ibid.
(17) Ibid. 58.
(18) Ibid.
(19) Ibid. 60.
(20) Ibid. 61
(21) Ibid.
(22) Slavoj Zizek, Psychoanalysis and Post Marxism: The Case of Alain Badiou, South
Atlantic Quarterly, Durham, 1998
(23) Ibid.
(24) Ibid.
(25) Mainly derived from Ballets and Another Dance Study: Settings and the Ballet.
Stphane Mallarm, Mallarm in Prose, ed, Mary Ann Caws, New York: New Directions,
2001. 108-116.
(26) Badiou, 64.
(27) Ibid. 63.
(28) Ibid. 64.
(29) Ibid.
(30) Ibid.
(31) Ibid. 65.
(32) Mallarm, 109.
(33) Badiou, 66.
(34) Ibid.
(35) Ibid.
(36) Mallarm, 109.