This exhibition features the renowned Tattoo series created by Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie (born 1969), one of the most prolific and influential artists, critics, curators and educators in China today. Qiu Zhijie began the Tattoo series in 1994. He, himself, is the bare-chested, expressionless figure in all the photographs. In the article “The Limit of Freedom”, Qiu remarked:

"I envy Kafka … who had an external reality to oppose and who felt the force of alienation pressing upon the Self… But I have lost such an external reality to press against. My environment and I are one, and nothing – neither movement nor alienation – can take place in this harmony. “I” is the name of an invisible man, and it will soon vanish even in my own memory." -Qiu Zhijie

Thanks to the transformative gift of over 190 important contemporary Chinese photographs from Jack and Susy Wadsworth in 2018, the JSMA is able to present the complete large-format series of nine Qiu Zhijie Tattoo images. Monumental in scale, these celebrated experimental works explore the power of media culture over human bodies and raise further questions about the response of the individual to mass media, as well as the nature of vision and illusion.

Qiu Zhijie has been a leading figure in conceptual art since the 1990s and served as curator of the China Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017. Currently Qiu is a professor at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, the dean of the School of Experimental Arts at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and was recently appointed president of the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts.

Qiu Zhijie Tattoo is curated by Anne Rose Kitagawa, Chief Curator, and Yan Geng, Curator of Contemporary & Traditional Chinese Art. Generous support for the exhibition was provided by the WLS Spencer Foundation.