Change is in the air. With daylight savings approaching and flowers blooming in the gaps between campus walkways, seasonal transience is on full display. While hearts may warm with joy as icy mornings fade into sunny days at Dexter Reservoir, the days spent chasing powder at Mt. Bachelor and surrounds are the inevitable sacrifice. Such bittersweet feelings are encapsulated within the light writing of renowned contemporary Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie, now on display in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

Qiu Zhijie has been a prominent name in the Chinese contemporary art scene for over three decades. From his first video exhibition in 1996, his role as an innovator in the contemporary art scene is undeniable. As president of the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts and a curator in his own right, Zhijie boasts a multidisciplinary portfolio covering a variety of mediums.

But when he introduced himself during his Feb. 2 panel at the JSMA, Zhijie characterized himself so the audience could understand his work. “I’ve always been asked who I am,” Zhijie said. “I am a mapper.”

For Zhijie, concept mapping is the combination of all his facets, a flow of curation, calligraphy, painting and journalism. He works in cartography both physically and conceptually. His work in physical cartography gained traction in 2017 following the release of “Map of the Theater of the World” at the Guggenheim Museum which led to many iterations involving concepts like technological ethics.

But broadly, his portfolio reflects a conceptual cartography, mapping the reality of a world straying from tradition and in the process of being overturned by AI.

As uncertainty continues to bombard the West, the choice of Yan Geng, a new curator for the JSMA, to display “Twenty-Four Seasons: Critical Temporality and Qiu Zhijie’s Light Writing” brings ideas of transience to the forefront of the Eugene community.

The exhibition was inspired by a generous donation of the photographs from Jack and Suzie Wadsworth in 2018, which finally brought together the 24 piece series created by Zhijie in 2005. After months of coordination, the showing began on Jan. 5, only six months after Geng joined the JSMA curatorial staff.

“This is a very important work that has been shown previously only in a gallery in New York,” Geng said. “There was a catalogue published, but this body of work hadn’t received the due scholarly attention.”

The collection highlights the technique of light writing, which involves slowing the shutter speed on a camera and drawing with LED while the shutter is open. The combination results in designs seemingly drawn into the photo by the artist. The method is reminiscent of work done by Picasso in the 1950s, but the fresh perspective Zhijie offers via his calligraphy provides a space for a dialogue between tradition and innovation.

“Qiu Zhijie is particularly interesting because he is not making the Chinese tradition something exotic or superficial,” Geng said. “He is using Chinese media with contemporary artists from other nations to deeply engage with some of the fundamental issues in contemporary art.”

By ignoring the perception that photographs are captured moments and exploring the process of writing calligraphy, Zhijie addresses the matter of transience with his light writing.

“Photography is not just about a moment,” Geng said. “It’s about a process and this process he was exploring is the process in which he was writing calligraphy.”

By engaging with his own cultural background, Zhijie provides a critical perspective of photography by which to push the medium forward.

Calligraphy, which Zhijie dissects, has a storied history as the first Chinese fine art and remains highly regarded today.

“Even until now, the traditional view on fine art has remained the same. The order of the most important fine art starts with poetry, then calligraphy (and) then painting,” Johnson Chang, a prominent curator and dealer of Chinese contemporary art, said during the JSMA panel on Feb. 2. “Almost all of it has to do with the written word, even painting, the aesthetics of painting has been founded on the brushwork and how the painter delivers his personality so in that sense Qiu Zhijie has basically unravelled the magic of the written word.”

By combining calligraphy with photography, a symbol of modern media, he shows that by blending the past and present a new future can be created. In unraveling the written word, Zhijie also creates space to explore the importance of calligraphy’s history. In China, the written word is entrenched in sociopolitics, and though it is often overlooked in the west, in the east, the power of the written word is second to none.

“Writing for China is very important, and even today, communist leaders like Mao Zedong wrote everywhere and wrote the names of certain institutions, universities, the newspapers and poetry,” Geng said. “Writing is very political in China. It is also a type of art and a method of personal expression for the highly educated elite. It’s a very complicated thing.”

Calligraphy has ties back to the Shang dynasty in around 1600 C.E. The artform — similar to western writing — has acted as a gatekeeper of information for the ruling class. In “Immutability and Impermanence in Qiu Zhijie’s Work”, a 2019 paper published by art historian and theorist Christine Vial Kayser wrote, “Literature and calligraphy are efficient means of ensuring the permanent hold on power by an educated class, as they rely on highly technical gestures and elaborate use of Chinese characters, which are closed off to the uneducated.”

But for Zhijie, the past offers important signposts which can be interpreted to understand the present and create the future.

“Qiu heralds the need to go back to the past of Chinese culture as instrumental to keep the culture alive and functional, providing existential benefits to both individuals and the society at large,” Kayser wrote. “The past is the horizon of progress, an attitude which he opposes to both Marxist and Capitalist teleology and the presumption of unfettered progress, based on a Darwinian view of nature”

It’s no secret that the first quarter of the 21st century has brought change on a scale yet unseen. Zhijie’s work explores the dialogue surrounding these changes.

“What he has done over the last 30 years in a way has shown us is the speed of history of these cultural changes and what it means and what has remained after all these changes,” Chang said. “What remains are some essential things that are preserved through Chinese civilization, but it may not last.”

The beauty of Zhijie’s light drawing lies in the capture of an ephemeral process. By capturing such complex emotions, the works themselves are signposts for the audience to follow into the future, embracing both the positive and negative feelings of change. Zhijie is chasing the future of art in a world where tech giants and their AI’s vie for control.

His primary projects include creating a branch in the School of Experimental Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing which focuses on developing art using the wonders of new technology. It serves as a place to educate the next generation of contemporary artists on experimentation and responsible use of the artificial intelligence that has taken the world by storm.

“He has a very ambitious plan and an interest in exploring AI in a more complicated way,” Geng said. “So for him, the AI is not just asking Deepseek to generate an image, to produce a video or something so simple. Instead, he is deeply interested in AI in the sense of art and technology and neuroscience and the study of the human beings.”

Zhijie has taken a truly experimental approach, using concepts of neuroscience to teach AI robot arms how to write his calligraphy and even attempting to create an AI version of himself by compiling his portfolio and plugging it into the neural network. Understanding the future lies in interdisciplinary collaboration, and Zhijie has enlisted a wide variety of professionals from neuroscientists to computer and natural scientists to contribute to the project.

This collaborative approach provides respite from the storm of technological and cultural change currently engulfing the world. It shows that through comradery and connection, humanity can embrace the ephemeral and tackle global issues together.The exhibit will be open until June 22nd.