Qiu Deshu is one of the few mainland Chinese artists to have received international recognition as early as the 1980s. He studied traditional ink painting and seal carving when he was a child but had to forgo his art when he was sent to work at a plastics factory during the Cultural Revolution.
Qui started painting again in the late 1970s and subsequently founded Grass Society (Caocaoshe), the famous experimental art group of the post-Mao era. It was about a decade later when he developed his signature style of ‘fissuring’ or lieban, as seen in the piece ECKART ASIA owns.
Lieban, which translates to ‘tearing and change’ in Chinese, is a technique that involves applying bright colours to xuan (rice) calligraphy paper, tearing them up, and then mounting the torn pieces on a base layer with spaces in between. It’s meant to symbolise the ‘cracks’ in one’s life journey, and also serves as a visual reflection of Qiu’s dramatic and often disrupted life and artistic career.
Qiu is listed in Chinese Ink Art 2020, and his work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, the Origo Family Foundation in Geneva, the Rathaus (City Hall) of Hamburg, the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, and the Shanghai Art Museum.
