To a large extent, painting maps is something I have enjoyed ever since I was young. When I was in middle school, there was a competition to assemble, as fast as possible, a complete map of China using maps of the 32 provinces. I probably did it in under thirty seconds—I was always first. Among students taking the art college entrance exams, I was probably one of the only kids who got a score above ninety in geography. It seems like an innate habit of mine. Then I began collecting maps. When I traveled to Xinjiang and Tibet, I would paint the villages: which part is the pond, which part is the pasture, which is the field—it was an anthropological interest. Perhaps it’s related to my early interest in archaeology as well. In an archaeological dig, you have to draw outlines of the locations where each object was buried. I think it’s related to that notion of archaeology. Of course, later I became an artist, and, being both an artist and a curator, I seem to encounter floor plans every day. When planning out the positions of artworks within a gallery, I always make myself a map, so I actually made many maps before this series.

In 2010, the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist commissioned me to paint a map of the 21st century for the DLD Conference: Digital-Life-Design. I was really satisfied with this map, even though at the time I didn’t have the joy of incorporating calligraphy, because that work had to be in English.
Then in 2012, I came across two things. One was that I was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim. In the past they would organize a group show with all the nominees and select the winner from this show. In ’96, it was Cai Guo-Qiang who won, and later Matthew Barney. When it came to my year, they changed the rules. They no longer did a group show; instead, they made a book of the nominees, and from this book they choose one winner to receive a solo show. In the book, each artist was allotted six pages called Artistic Projects, and I was worried about how to use six pages to introduce myself. I think I’m pretty complicated, a curator and a professor, an artist and a writer, and my art has always run the gamut from calligraphy to technology and computers, theater, installation, video, and photography. What could I do? So I thought, oh well, I’m greedy, I’m not willing to let anyone simplify me. I decided I would paint five maps. One would introduce my work as a professor. That’s called the Map of Total Art. One would introduce my most important art project, titled Map of the Nanjing Yangtze Bridge. One would introduce my work as a curator, called Map of Reactivation, which I made for the Shanghai Biennale. Then there was the ready-made map of the 21st century. I also painted Map of Utopia, which depicted utopian thought. I put these five maps in the Hugo Boss Prize catalogue.
Then, at the same time, I was named chief curator of the Shanghai Biennale. I thought to myself, there are so many curators in the world, and I’m just an amateur. However, I am probably the best draftsman among all the world’s curators, because I was the top student in the Printmaking Department of the Zhejiang Academy of Art. So why should I act the same as all curators and write some long, 10,000-character curatorial essay to open the catalogue. No, I want to paint a map that can take the place of that curatorial essay, and thus I made Map of Reactivation for the Shanghai Biennale.
So because of Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Hugo Boss Prize, and the Shanghai Biennale, I started to make maps on a large scale. Once I began painting maps, I couldn’t stop, because it was something that really suited me. For me, painting maps brings together painting, calligraphy, research, writing, and curatorial planning all in one activity. I sometimes find the joy of research to be greater than that of painting. At times, I find acting as a curator to organize new relationships is more important than making some new, individual thing. All these ideas can be realized within the practice of painting maps.

The version of Map of Hong Kong Culture on display here comprises the original drawings for a public art installation commissioned by the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway. The final form of the artwork was a mural of metal plates displayed in the departure hall of Hong Kong West Kowloon Station. It’s kind of like Hong Kong’s Grand Central Station—Hong Kongers set off from this station en route to Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou. So I thought it would be really interesting to draw a map of Hong Kong culture in a place like this. This map touches upon every facet of Hong Kong, from the composition of its population to its literature, from kung fu novels to serious works of literature. It covers the history of Hong Kong’s newspapers and magazines, from its earliest English and Chinese newspapers right through to the most important websites and online communities around today. It continues with Hong Kong comics, pop music, TV dramas, films, cuisine, theater, architecture, athletics, and even the city’s urban legends. The small island in the center of the map’s symmetrical composition comes from the comic McDull. So I expect this map should inspire a wide range of emotions in the viewer simultaneously. Owing to Hong Kong’s special position in the world, its films and pop music are now a part of a global collective memory shared by all people of Chinese descent. There’s one island that is Anita Mui, another that is Leslie Cheung, and a valley that is the Four Heavenly Kings. While I was drawing this map, people nearby might catch sight of a certain word or name, and they would tearfully begin belting out a song. This is why I say that this piece stirs up a lot of feelings—it’s a very emotional map. There are a couple of other interesting places, especially the food. There’s an island for Hong Kong cafes, another for desserts; one peninsula for Western food, another for Chaozhou and Cantonese cuisine. It’s a mouth-watering map. This is the kind of work that Map of Hong Kong Culture is.

Isms at the End of the World comprises 28 tables. In truth, there could be even more. Currently, every table is still relatively focused, each with a focused topic. For example, there’s one table that is East Asian philosophy, one that is generally closer to Christianity, one that is closer to socialist thought, one that discusses nationalism and imperialism. Some tables are more concerned with literature and art—realism, naturalism, surrealism, futurism, and so on. I want to use these tables as maps of human ideologies, giving each table an element of classification to it.
I designed these tables to look like islands. If you look down on them from above, they strongly resemble islands with people traversing between them. I tried to find the most classic “ism” words—we all know, for example, Marxism, Maoism, rationalism, irrationalism. There are so many different isms in the world. But in the end, I was delighted to find that you can affix an ism to pretty much any word in the world. Tea can become Tea-ism, or beer beer-ism. You can add “ism” to the end of any person’s name. You can be an adherent of Philip Tinari-ism or UCCA-ism. And then every emotion can also become an ism, pessimism or optimism. The only word that cannot take an “ism” is “ism” itself. There will never be an ism-ism. This profound reality inspired me to name this work Isms at the End of the World.

These 24 maps comprise the most important series in the exhibition “Mappa Mundi.” Each map has an independent theme, from architecture and stories to maps of utopias, food, bodies, professions, and garments—I made a map based on every object I could think of. An interesting feature of this series is that the compositions of every map connect together. They actually enclose a circle, such that last in the series connects with the first to construct a complete world. Of course, this set of maps was painted over three years, so the style of the works from three years ago is somewhat different than that of the later pieces. The manner of painting has changed. In these three years, my English writing ability has gone from childish to mature. Although the style is not unified, I don’t believe I should go back and repaint the first few works, as they also preserve my understanding and consideration of maps at the time.
The most interesting part of these paintings is that, like the way in which they are compositionally linked, their concepts are also interconnected. For example, I painted a map of travelers, and to the left of this is a map of religions, because many people travel for religious reasons, whether as missionaries or pilgrims. To the right of the Map of Travelers is the Map of Utopia, as one body of travel literature is utopian literature, such as the book Utopia. People always imagine that a more beautiful institutional design lies in some remote land outside of our everyday lives. Later in the series, Map of Flora is naturally more closely connected to Map of Food. The animals in Map of Animals are often mythologized into legendary beasts, such as the qilin, dragon, and other imaginary, magical creatures. These mythical beasts easily translate into a map of gods. One can see that the paintings are formally linked, and at the same time there are persistent conceptual and metaphorical slippages between them.

Dr. He Xiaodong from JD AI Research and I built a mind map of speech generated in real time. The team at the Central Academy of Fine Arts made the front-end based on my map, while the engineering team at Jingdong made the core database. As a person speaks, it generates a mind map that expands outward with verbal associations. As the program developed, I began to dislike how normal all the connections were, so I made a group of mind maps to train the AI model. I slowly gave it the ability to make jokes and mischief like me, and it took on a leaping, poetic quality. After we trained it for a month, the result was much more exciting.
So as we speak, the program uses our speech to generate a map. The mountain architecture is taken from my previous maps. You can click through to go deeper or expand on different sections. Of course, as our language develops, the map will also constantly renew itself. In my view, this creates a new possibility: we all know that in the past, a conversation comprised two discussants exchanging literal meaning. Now, however, every word can be augmented with this mind map. That is to say, you hear the other person’s voice, but you see the mind map that underpins this speech. You see the complete context. On the one hand, there are the textual and metaphorical levels of understanding and exchange, and on the other we can visually receive the broader context implicated by every sentence. And this context was trained according to the logic of my map. In this way, it creates the potential for a higher-order conversation, which is where the significance of this artwork lies.

One day, Alexandra Munroe of the Guggenheim called me and said, “Zhijie, sorry, we still need to exhibit your Orchid Pavilion Preface, but we’ll take your advice and not show the No photo. But a bit of good news—we would like to commission you to paint a new map. It is the only new work in this exhibition.” I was of course very happy to present my newest work at the Guggenheim. In the classroom, I discuss these four decades of Chinese art history and the history of Chinese political thought, as well as their many connections to various globalized historical events. This is what I do every day at the art academy. So for me, the research for this map was unprecedentedly easy. It was like I had spent the past few decades constantly researching in preparation for this work.
In the map, we see a river that begins with the Cultural Revolution, the reevaluation of the Cultural Revolution, the ’85 New Wave movement, and the “China/Avant-Garde” show. This contemporary experiment in Chinese art is like a torrent that forms a reservoir, which in turn rushes toward a dam. It surges forward until the present day, an estuary opening onto the sea. In the middle, it traverses the marketization and urbanization of the 1990s and the media revolution, when everyone began using video and performance. It flows alongside curatorial experiments, the rise of the 798 Art District, museums, the Olympics, and the financial crisis. This is the river of Chinese contemporary art. The mountain range above it is the history of Chinese thought, starting with the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art followed by the great mountain of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Here there is also Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Peak of Three Represents, the Peak of Scientific Development, and finally the Peak of the China Dream. I painted this map before the 19th National Congress, so they hadn’t yet called it the New Era. Below is the entire course of globalization, from the reestablishment of diplomatic ties between China and the US to the Cold War, the rise of multiculturalism, 9/11, and the economic crisis. It is a winding map of Chinese contemporary art squeezed between the two mountain ranges of globalized political history and forty years of Chinese political history.

Map of Continuum is a work I painted for the Chinese Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. Everything in this map seems arranged by chance. While preparing for the exhibition “Continuum” at the Chinese Pavilion, my father passed away, so I was thinking a lot about life, about death, about lineages of information that exist between people, lineages of will, and the relationship between people, their native soil, and their families. From a distance, this map imitates a taijitu, but it is actually a map of Venice. The s-shaped Grand Canal closely resembles a taijitu.
The work explores several stories addressed in the Chinese Pavilion, such as the classical painting Skeleton Fantasy Show, the legend of the old man who moves mountains, the legend of Jingwei filling the sea, the myth of Kua Fu chasing the sun, the legend of the Kun transforming into the Peng. This imagery reflects extended efforts: continuously chasing the sun, continuously digging out a mountain, continuously filling in the sea, continuously changing. The left side of the painting discusses lineages of tutelage, while the right explores change. All the works in the Chinese Pavilion are interspersed throughout this map, hidden in different sections. Like I did for the Shanghai Biennale, I used this map as an overarching curatorial tool. The map also became the poster for the Chinese Pavilion, hung in various locations around Venice. Because time was short, I only made a pencil version back then. For the UCCA exhibition, I painted an ink version of Map of Continuum. It’s a version that I’ve always wanted to make but left incomplete for a year and a half. I finally finished it here

The visual and epistemological qualities of maps make them especially suitable for repeat readings on a wall. They’re not the kind of thing that you can take in all at one glance. They can be revisited and reviewed often, and you can find new things each time. I think this must be the reason why people like to invite me to make map wall paintings. This time, when Philip Tinari and I discussed whether I could paint a map on a large wall for the UCCA exhibition, I thought about UCCA’s position within 798, 798’s position within all of Chinese contemporary art, Chinese contemporary art’s position within Chinese art, and Chinese art’s position within all of society and the world. To some extent, I felt I didn’t really have a choice in the themes of this work: I had to paint a map of the art world. For me to paint a map of the art world is a pretty powerful discursive position. The only tricky part was whether or not to include all those secrets that I know. Of course, with all maps you can zoom in and out. I think it will be good to have some parts very detailed and skip over other parts, leaving them blank.