Animating Time to Disrupt History: Qiu’s Anxiong’s Minguo Fengjing

The pointed use of “minguo” in the title of Qiu Anxiong’s 2008 animation Minguo Fengjing already signals the artist’s critical questioning of received histories. “Minguo” is used in Taiwan to refer to the 1912 founding of the Republic of China and is still employed as the basis for calendrical time there. The official account that Qiu grew up with, in contrast, presents the early twentieth century exclusively as a dark, feudal era that was only liberated by the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In his presentation of dueling political factions, Qiu shows the tragic repetitions underlying how narratives of passionate conviction unfold. Interspersed with these images of violence, he weaves together a number of vignettes—of nameless factory workers, tireless peasants, an iconic film star, etc.—to register how different people experienced these decades. This paper analyzes Qiu’s artistic strategies for exploring and enacting distinct perceptions of temporality. In particular, I focus on how he uses the titular “fengjing”—often translated as “landscape” or “scenery”—to draw attention to not only the actors moving swiftly across the screen, but also the plodding constancy of the background itself. Activated through linear progressions and iterative cycles, the sequencing of these scenes presents multiple ways of measuring change. In its study of marking time, Minguo Fengjing challenges the totalizing logics that have authorized limited ways of seeing the past while, furthermore, inviting viewers to meditate on the processes of delineation, accumulation, and obfuscation in art and history.