On September 12, Hong Kong’s Hanart TZ Gallery announced the passing of Qiu Shihua, a pioneering figure in contemporary Chinese landscape painting. He died at the age of 85 in Shenzhen.

Born in 1940 in Sichuan, Qiu graduated in 1962 from the Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts, where he trained in oil painting alongside traditional Chinese landscape ink painting. Early in his career, the Cultural Revolution abruptly interrupted his practice, and he was conscripted to create propaganda posters and perform unskilled labor. For more than two decades, Qiu resided on the vast, austere plains of northwest China, developing a profound sensitivity to nature’s quiet rhythms.

During the 1980s, Qiu relocated to Shenzhen and was able to visit Europe, where he encountered the works of French Impressionists. The period marked a profound transformation in his style and philosophy. Embracing Taoist principles, he shifted his focus from detailed depictions of the material world to a mode of painting that explores themes of emptiness, calm, and the essence of “the beginning.” Qiu’s signature “white landscapes” emerged from this spiritual and artistic evolution, blending Chinese traditional aesthetics with Western abstract techniques.

These ethereal, nearly monochromatic canvases reveal subtle, shifting scenes that challenge conventional notions of visibility and perception. Qiu’s technique involved him painting an initial outline with dark paint on unprimed canvas, then obscuring it with layers of white pigment. His rigorous minimalism created an effect where forms alternately emerge and recede from view, evoking in viewers a state of meditative calm. The artist once stated: “Everything is flat and calm. Form is unimportant. It is like being in meditation, when the entire cosmos looks like a white mist. Here, time and space seem to be annihilated. Human passions do not matter.”

Throughout his career, Qiu exhibited extensively around the world, earning acclaim at prestigious venues including the São Paulo Art Biennial (1996), the Venice Biennale (1999), the Shanghai Biennale (2004), and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2012). His works are held in leading museums such as M+ in Hong Kong, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Based in Basel for three years from 2002 to 2005, Qiu also briefly resided in San Francisco around 2005 to 2006. In his later years, he lived and worked between Beijing and Shenzhen, where he passed away. 

Arphy Li is an editorial assistant at ArtAsiaPacific.