Qiu Anxiong — The New Book of Mountains and Seas

Since 2005, Qiu Anxiong has been dedicated to exploring traditional ink painting techniques, visual motifs, and iconographical icons in new media art. 

One of his most representative works is the trilogy The New Book of Mountains and Seas, produced between 2006 and 2017. Both the title and part of the conceptual framework draw inspiration from The Book of Mountains and Seas (Shan Hai Jing), a mythological and geographical compendium in China, dating back to the fourth-century BCE. 

Although using East Asian visual language and aesthetics, Qiu engages with contemporary concerns surrounding the global eco-system, political turmoils and the ever-changing definition of “humanity” in this age. 

Qiu’s The New Book of Mountains and Seas and select prints will be shown at Richmond Art Gallery’s Qiu Anxiong, Howie Tsui: The Roaming Peach Blossom Spring from June 28 to Aug. 24, 2025. The dual show is curated by Rebecca Wang.

(Vancouver-based artist Tsui is also featured in the exhibition; working in ink brush, sound sculptures, lenticular lightboxes and installation, he has shown his work around the world, including Glenbow, The Power Plant and the Macao International Art Biennale.)

As an internationally recognized practitioner of new media art grounded in ink painting, Qiu approaches each project through a rigorous and labour-intensive process. He starts with hand-drawn sketches, which are then rendered into acrylic-on-canvas ink-style paintings. These are then digitized and manipulated, selectively erased, or overpainted as the visual narrative progresses. 

For Qiu, “the world that people perceive is precisely the world they themselves construct.”

At first glance, Qiu’s new media works may appear meditative and suffused with Zen tranquility, but they are permeated with disquieting imagery. Once-verdant mountains and oceans are displaced into a distant utopia; polluted air has transmuted into toxic seas; animals are commodified as raw materials and functional components within an industrial matrix, some grotesquely reengineered as machinery or instruments of war. 

×

Expand

Qiu Anxiong, “The New Book of Mountains and Seas Part 1,” 2006, animation still (courtesy of the artist)

In the final part of the trilogy, Qiu proffers a provisional response to this dystopia. Individuals, numb to the barrenness of reality, seek refuge in a virtual Neverland, while subjected to omnipresent surveillance by monstrous camera-creatures.

Qiu, whose works are part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection, identifies profound parallels between mythology and science fiction. To him, “mythology is the spiritual core of humanity, while science fiction represents the mythology of the present.” 

In The New Book of Mountains and Seas, Qiu refrains from directly referencing the fantastical creatures of the original Shan Hai Jing. Rather, he adopts the animistic worldview articulated in the text, and reconfigures it through ink painting and a non-linear, minimally narrative structure characteristic of many East Asian mythologies. 

Visually, Qiu employs a compressed pictorial space that allows the digital composition to unfold like an ink painting handscroll. Although applying the visual language and motifs from Chinese ink painting, Qiu also integrates contemporary urban landscapes, including Shanghai’s skyscrapers and temples, Chongqing’s tourist landmarks, and the orientalist-styled gate of Berlin Zoological Garden. By doing so, he forges a hybridized, strikingly surreal depiction of “Eastern cyberpunk” imaginary scenes.

×

Expand

Qiu Anxiong, “The New Book of Mountains and Seas Part 3,” 2017, animation still (courtesy of the artist)

Completed in 2016, The New Book of Mountains and Seas III departs from the narrow, scroll-like aspect ratios of its predecessors. Instead, it opts for a standardized cinematic frame and a synthesis of 2D and 3D techniques. The result is reminiscent of the speculative neo-Chinatowns depicted in the film Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. 

In this episode, Qiu also introduces a soundtrack in the movie for the first time. The repeating lyric, “Life has no roots or foundation; it drifts like dust along the road. Blown apart, turning with the wind — this body is not the same as before,” derives from the poetry of Tao Yuanming, a fourth-century Chinese scholar. This poem's Daoist-inflected nihilism resonates with the dystopian blurred realities and the semi-cyborg form of the human body articulated in Anxiong’s The New Book of Mountains and Seas III.

The New Book of Mountains and Seas trilogy does not adhere to a fixed timeline or specific geographical setting. Although each part has its core theme, the open-ended narrative allows ample room for viewers’ imaginations. 

Alongside the distinct storylines and themes of each installment, the trilogy shares a conceptual thread: a critical inquiry into the cost of rapid social and technological development; the destruction of the environment; the erosion of values and cultural heritage; and the resulting “mutation” of humanity and civilization.

Yet Qiu's practice remains firmly grounded in sustained, empirical observation of contemporary society. He conceptualizes sociocultural development as non-linear, akin to the temporal structure of his own new media works. In his view, the past, present and future may coalesce within the same spatiotemporal continuum. The future and antiquity may appear as interlinked termini of a Möbius strip. 

As such, narrative tropes of science fiction — such as interstellar colonization, which is part of the story of The New Book of Mountains and Seas II — are not necessarily remote from present realities.

“The logic of colonization has remained essentially unchanged. It progressed from the seas to the continents, and now toward the cosmos,” Qiu says. 

“As long as the foundational logic of development and productivity under a post-industrialized and capitalism world persists, the expansion of cities remains inevitable, and so does colonization.” ■

Qiu Anxiong, Howie Tsui: The Roaming Peach Blossom Spring will be on view from June 28 to Aug. 24, 2025 at Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, British Columbia.

PS: Worried you missed something? See previous Galleries West stories here or sign up for our free biweekly newsletter.