At the end of the 1970s, a classically trained Chinese painter, Qiu Deshu, being inspired by the traversing cracks on an aged stone slate pioneered a highly experimental and distinctive approach to the traditional art of Chinese ink. With his profound knowledge of traditional painting and paper mounting techniques, he pushed the expressive power of the xuan paper to an exceptional height, elevating the media’s traditionally passive and subsidiary status. By tearing, carving and rubbing, Qiu Deshu creates irregular tears and feathering of the paper that will later bear different color schemes and shapes to suggest landscapes evocative in traditional Chinese paintings.

Although experimental, Qiu Deshu’s choice of ink as a media and his use of various gradations of black ink in Fissuring Series, exemplify how the tradition of ink painting remains highly relevant in the artist’s work. Yet, the clusters of earthly colors and the random cracks and veins present a visual experience like that of Qiu Deshu’s serendipitous discovery in the cracks of the aged stone. Between the abstract composition and the visual experience, the work presents a dichotomy between the world of abstraction and the world of representation.