Stepping into Qiu Zhijie's solo exhibition Breaking Through the Ice at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing is like embarking on an ill-fated journey. Through installations, sculptures and ink paintings, the artist questions Chinas obsession with grand projects of modernization. In The Sinking Giant, an enormous, rusty ship's bow tilts upwards from a sea of broken blocks of ice. A dense mess of footprints on the deck evokes images of panicking passengers running in all directions. The bow also resembles the heel of a giant foot sticking out of the water. Both metaphors signal the ultimate decline of any vast man-made structure. Further on, the ship's deck is littered with remnants of industrial products (pictured above). The steel floor is deteriorating: parts peel off and curve upwards, revealing old newspaper cuttings citing revolutionary slogans and stories of China's engineering miracles. Lining the walls, 30 ink paintings together form a side view of the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, an icon of China's industrial development.
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