Qiu Zhijie is the President of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts and Vice President and Professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. His creative practice spans various mediums including technology art, ecological art, calligraphy, ink painting, photography, video, installation, and theater. He has published several theoretical works on art, including On Total Art, Image and Postmodernity, Give Me a Mask, The Boundary of Freedom, The Scene is Most Important, Photography After Photography, Spoiler, The Ignorant, Experimentalist, and Loser. His major catalogues include Animism, Qiu Zhijie: Breaking The Ice, A History, The Shape of Time: Works by Qiu Zhijie, Mochou: Recent Works by Qiu Zhijie and Archeology of Memory.

Qiu has held dozens of solo exhibitions at domestic and international art museums and has participated in hundreds of group exhibitions. He curated China’s earliest video art exhibition Image and Phenomena in 1996, as well as the Post-Sence Sensibility series of exhibitions promoting young artists between 1999 and 2005. He served as the Chief Curator of the 9th Shanghai Biennale Reactivation in 2012 and was the curator of the China Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017.

Since 2003, Qiu has been dedicated to contemporary art education. His concept of “Total Art” is based on cultural studies and integrates observation, creation, scene, event, writing, and curation, seeking to connect art with life, art with society, and art with science. In recent years, he has focused on building an experimental art education system, particularly in the fields of social art and technology art. In 2017, he founded the EAST International Alliance for Techno-Art Education at CAFA.

Qiu Zhijie is a co-founder of ICAST and has been actively involved in its curatorial projects, forums, and teaching activities since its inception. His projects are significant learning experiences for ICAST students and include Reactivation: The 9th Shanghai Biennale and the Zhongshan Park Project.