For painting, what is important is not its deep meaning, but its perceptual immediacy. After all, meaning is short cut of thought, not the perceptual principles of life, not the art works itself. Based on a valuable system, meaning is actually the purpose. But what is it like before it becomes meaningful? The soul’ singing, emotional feelings and the free abandonment… all of these are the life of the whole, containing everything like the soil, but it as well brews the growth of all kinds of possible life’s meaning.

　　This is our natural attitude toward Qiu Jun’s paintings .

　　Honestly speaking, Qiu Jun who was born in the 1960's is similar to his peers. All of them are growing up accompanied by the expansion of political nature and utilitarian momentum. When art becomes a tool, the meaning becomes a hamper and a hindrance, and art becomes depleted and empty. As the result, the foreign modernism creation, which was introduced in and accepted by the Chinese people, was developing in China in the way of breaking away from bondage and burden of explanation from the start. Qiu Jun, who majored in oil painting, graduated from Nanjing Arts Institute, experienced this period as well. In modern art, people have adopted immitation, abstraction decoration and non-artistic to avoid deep meaning in order to emphasize meaninglessness of art, whereas Qiu Jun was conscious to return the principles of human life, before becoming meaningful, he consistently looked for the directions and paths of his own. This is our natural attitude toward Qiu Jun’s paintings.

　　"Before becoming meaningful" means both the appearance of Qiu Jun's paintings and an issue which the whole painting circle is facing. The issue is that meaning with the character of dispersing copied information is above image, however, it is inevitable to make the way of image appearing narrow and unitary in the transfering process between explaining and signifing so that it has become stiff and indifferent. The substantivity of perception, rather than direct implication, is the essence of paintings, movies, and other vision works which create meaning. This is true even to the advertisement of high intentionality. After all, the substantivity of perception is lively experience, cozy comfort, with boundless richness which does not exist in the process of implication.

　　The most precious features of Qiu Jun’s paintings lie here. His paintings are quite expressive and modern, and at the same time not the least lack of the breeding of the traditional Chinese paintings and western classic art. We can get the impression from the Talk with Horses (oil on canvas) in the late 1990s, About Shadow series (oil on canvas) in 2007 to The Sketchy series (oil on canvas), even some of his little work. In general, these pieces of work are full of perception manifested in a manner of purity, straightness and transparency. You can never find a hard paste of mind nor dissever of contents with forms, let alone the strengthen interpretation of meaning.

　　Particularly in the series of Talk with Horses, Qiu Jun displays the horse – a over artistically expressed species which were tamed by humanbeings 4,000 years ago. He used more than 70 paintings, in the way of front view, to display the horse in details. It might be the horse which, wild and tamed, has a destiny of enslaved but noble. It might be the horse which has lost its use step by step in the course of time. Or, it might be nothing else but the painter himself and his expression of internal diversity and emotion.

　　The sorrel horse with his eyes, half–hidden under the shaggy mane blurring, reflects the desolation of a millennium and the calmness of the moment. If we say, Talk with Horses took off modernism, and then the charm of Qiu Jun’s paintings has transcend the protary reality, so as to that in the following seris of Talk with Horses, Qiu seemed to have found a transcending-ever intelligence energy, and expressed gradually what he desired in a gushing manner. What a great sense and what a broad range of language! All was found in the calm little by little. It is so calm that it makes viewers aching! Talk with Horses twists the emotion state of mind to a subtle degree.

　　From pencils, papers to clothes as well as from modality, imagery to mood of horse, we can find modernism, expressionism, even minimalism, all of which were introduced exotically. However, horse, painted by Qiu Jun, serious or humorous, false or real, complex or simple, tamed or revolt, alert or clumsy, concrete or abstract, fully expresses an indelible Chinese temperaments.

　　Between the subject of the painting and the background of the virtual and existential, Qiu Jun did not employ the full line to draw the outline, but through chiaroscuro, actual situation echo and faint compatibility reveals the main image honestly and timidly. If we say subject and background constitute a blending stereoscopic room, then it tells time story of a glimpse of millennium in space.

　　Margin is a constraint. Skills can be seen in properly handlement. And Qiu Jun is striving for this. Sweeping the canvas slightly and exposing the original color, there emerges a gradual fading, colorful and diversified mottled sense, even endowed with sense of quality of fresco.

　　Perhaps, those who appreciate marginal art would respect the option of marginal framework. When Talk with Horses drawing a conclusion, in 2007 Qiu Jun found another way of expression—About Shadow series, which were emotionally connected with Talk with Horse.

　　In more than 30 paintings in the series of About Shadow, we can find a man with various postures and gloomy expressions in dull frames. In it, the main image dissociates the environment, drives straightly into human’s inner heart. It seems to be the entangling inside Qiu Jun himself. However, the entanglement is still aesthetical and perceptual. This is a track for keeping transcending, though some kind of restless and frankness. But by seizing lightness to manifest shadow is the homeward journey of the wiser, as what Oscar Wilde had said, the secrete of the world is something visible rather than something invisible .

　　We can still find tracks of surpass and hunting in the series of Sketch in 2010. In the seris of Sketch, lightness no longer presents varieties of shadows. Its utterance is no longer propositional, but still wide to the extent that it can always touch feelings. Main images are found in specifications and abstractions, keeping on searching sometimes in an intensive way and sometimes in a relaxed way, and are teemed with texture senses. Colors are turned from dullness into flashy. Layering becomes rich and brim becomes integrated. Layer upon layer from the light greenness, the "instant moment" is presented. It seems like a moment of life stream. It also seems to be an energetic portrait, a tiger’s glance-bac, or a Quixote’s glimpse… vagueness, confusedness and calmness remain pure and perceptual.

　　If we say that, in Talk with Horses, Qiu Jun returns to the origin of life perception and finds a lively and warm keynote, then the more than 20 pieces of paintings in the series of Sketch must be graceful overtones consonated with the keynotes. While keynotes determine the fundamental pitch of Qiu Jun’s works, overtones will be planted in the body forever. Going back to the base point of art to peruse and feel the paintings and we will find that it is the portraiture of Qiu Jun himself and his works. It is an intellectual parallelism just like "a thousand lamps shining in the same room reflecting one another". The paintings touching our bodies and our hearts deeply and quietly waking up our visions, hearings and sensations are just about to mount the stage of becoming meaningful.

　　Qiu Jun says that perception-hunting is an instinct without satisfaction for him. "To tell the truth, how I wish I could run in the world free of ties, boldly and curiously. How I wish that I could, again, briefly sleep on a fragrant, tranquil, summer noon under the tree shade in the midway of my running. Go with you freely toward next direction".

　　By Liu Jie, Translated by Wu Zhongming

　　Song Zhuang (the Song Manor), Beijing

　　August 10th, 2010

作者：刘洁