Qiu Anxiong

In a feat consistent with China’s boundless capacity for manual labor, curator Pi Li has relocated a complete train car to the inside of his 21,500-square-foot space for Qiu Anxiong’s exhibition “Staring into Amnesia.” The sole entrance is a house-of-horrors low stairway that funnels visitors into this gloomy train. Inside, twenty-four black-and-white archival film loops unfurl onto the windows, a different projection for each seating compartment. Socialist workers climb mountains in epic infrastructure projects, and the pruned faces of model workers stare back at you, intercut with Qiu’s animations and accompanied by twelve audio loops, ranging from folk music to experimental jazz. The heat, volume, and speed of visual information inside this time-capsule reliquary overwhelms.

Emerging from the cacophony at the opposite end of the train, one sees the second half of the installation, which gives it conceptual gravity: a nebulous cloud of screens suspended in the darkness amid ambient electronic throbs. Depicted on the fragmented surfaces are three hikers escaping urbanity to amble in Sichuan’s mountains; their hiking gear and unfamiliarity reveal their trendy, middle-class interest in outdoor sports. Where Qiu’s previous installation work was criticized as lacking continuity, here the train’s allusion to progressions, journeys, and the evolution of the modern sociopolitical landscape links the halves coherently. The exhibition creates a memorable space to address the conflicting relationship between the authenticity of individual memories and the reconstruction of official history, a theme haunting much art from China today.