It is evident that, for both artists Qiu Hongfeng and Xu Tong, through which way of art media medium to express the proper reality of life is a top priority in all their work. By coincidence, they happen to be friends of mine, thus I roughly come to understand their reasons of having prudent attitude toward their work, of having hidden passion and of having to rack their brains about it.

I never doubt that every single responsible artist will take their own judgement as part of the universality of the world or else the work can not be carried on. On the contrary, while I standing in front of QIU Hongfeng and XU Tong’s work the feeling stir inside of me untimely is the word of ‘ambivalence’.

To study carefully, what caused me to react in such way is that I was trying to find a point where could match along with the world as I saw it. Though it is not an apriority method for being a good appreciator their work, for sure, have touched one like me whom had experienced a life forked into different places, such as spent twenty more years in Shenyang and then another twenty years in Beijing. The chief reason why I can not make precise sense of them is because I am not able to see it under the knowledge related, emotionally not allowed.

The work of QIU Hongfeng reflects the time of history which period is familiar to every child brought up in northeast, as same as a customary dream. At one time, he and I bolted the matter fairly of the memory of socialist industry to the bran, asking if it was nice and worth remembering about that also came down to his work, in which was the representation of either the fine memory or the painful past, was about to digest or to bury it? He has hesitated in between due to his affective tolerance. Who is able to drain life of one’s childhood once and for all? Even though we once lived in a time of having had aesthetic value, and destructive power of vain political attempt deserted people’s personal desire, therefore to recollect the bygone days had become the main feature of groupment recall in which I personally take it as a sad life and a regret of human nature.

QIU Hongfeng has tenaciously strived to recreate the industrial remains covered with teary memory. The ruined scenes carry the gutted life as if carrying archives.

The technicality side of photography makes it a dispassionate operation mode somehow. So, the huge scale pictures of XU Tong’s describe the spreading out pace of Beijing city. If Shenyang is the memory kept in QIU Hongfeng’s painting, well then Xu Tong’s photo makes us watchful about how a speedy outstretched city can destroy ordinary people’s memory. Strategically, the persistence for cultural retention looks very much false sentimentality, such as the reconstructed Qian Men. This is Beijing. It is neither Paris nor London, nor Buenos Aires and nor Tehran after all.

Cities turn our lives into a state of unnatural rationalization where we will never head back to see how much the man-made waste we leave behind, because every one has to rush ahead by some unknown driving force. I firmly believe that XU Tong love to use lens to support his acknowledge of reality, in which mixed the contradiction between collectivism and individual, politics and economies of scope and culture which’s imperative formulation. Along with which are the city residents grow afraid that they have to carry on living a life among the scene of being magnificent and desolation. The work named “Liulitun refuse landfill” describe a place underneath where buries thousands, even millions people’s past though they themselves not care to concern of it. Outside a city’s timeline it is an integrated history by period, in which there are unbounded reality and lowliness remain in concealment.

Through the creation of stretched horizon and waving perspective, both QIU and XU are emphasis space and the historical memory within. It is art relied on ritualized form of technique, no other than to reveal the artists’ self-contradiction: one aspect is in an attempt to illuminate the reality by their artistic splendor, and another aspect is always of, at the meantime, being tortured by their innermost hope of having the high life with luxury.