Qiu Zhijie at Galleria Continua, Beijing

Born in the Fujian province in 1969, Qiu Zhijie is one of China’s leading artists and one of the first to be exhibited outside of the national borders. Now it’s a foreign gallery, Italy-based Galleria Continua, that promotes his works in the temple of Beijing’s contemporary art, the Dashanzi 798 Art Factory.

In this solo exhibition, Satire, the artist makes a reference to the well known book The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco; without talking in detail about the book’s plot, its story told about a series of homicides committed in a Medieval monastery in order to protect Aristotle’s second book On Poetics. This volume, which talks about laugh and pleasure, was deemed to be intolerable in the Medieval world rules based on Christian morality.

Well now, Aristotele’s book is owned by Qiu Zhijie, who shows some of its chapters to the exhibition’s public. People can laugh and achieve the forbidden knowledge, gaining a powerful tool of expression. That’s what the laughing Emo toys stand for: an attempt to break all the ideologies that have been fitted into the individual mind, from the Holy Bible to the Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung.

Qiu Zhijie, Satire at Galleria Continua, Beijing, through February 23, 2014.