How has the pandemic affected your artistic practice?

Although my life on the surface has not changed much, the impacts on my mind and mentality have been quite prominent. I can clearly sense the demarcation of the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic worlds. In the face of a disaster that gradually spreads and submerges all, my stress response is stretched and lengthened because of it. This translates into the instantaneity of my creation: when working, I now spend less time on deliberation, and often go ahead with an idea without too much thinking. I also no longer isolate myself from the external world, since quarantine and lockdown paradoxically make me feel more connected to the world than before.

Do you have a set routine when creating artworks, or is your process randomized? Please describe either way?

I remember answering this question in 16 Personalities Test. They appear to be two distinctive approaches, but actually for me they are integrated into one. I work under a fully random, almost intuitive condition in which my creation follows a routinised convention. In almost every single piece of my work there coexist both randomisation and routine, persistently co-present in the beginning, during the making and till the ending.

Weve read that your artwork separates itself from the art scene. Do you feel thats accurate? Is the scene possible to escape? Is that a personal behavioral condition or is it more about your artistic output and subject matter?

We are all aware that the art scene is a cage, arent we? It is where Statues Also Die (Les statues Meurent Aussi (1953)). It is possible to escape the scene on the plane of religiosity: it is leaving in the heart[1]a separationhere and now. However, on the plane of reality where there is nowhere to escape to, I can only choose to stare, to look it in the eye. It is in this stare that it becomes the scene, rather than the art scene.

Would you agree there is a voyeuristic quality about your work that is different from other painters? Is painting fundamentally voyeuristic? Why or why not?

My painting does not originate from voyeurism, but I get what you mean. Audience may experience a voyeuristic quality, and this is because they cannot stand being directly exposed to the center of the scene hence subject to the stare (almost all of my paintings project the stare at the scene). Voyeurism is more of a description of where the audience stand the security of that spot, which allows them to see all and in the meantime hide themselves in the darkthe peephole is ready made.

Painting in its essence is not voyeuristic. However, it can be seen with the voyeuristic gaze, projected from the peeping eye. I think its more accurate to say that we are voyeurs of the reality rather than of painting.

When do you feel the most confident?

When a painting is completed.

Whats next?

Know myself, know the world; hopefully I can bring benefits to more people.

Pete Jiadong Qiang (b. 1991), lives and works in London. The artist explores the spaces of pictorial, architectural, and game, as well as interstices between the three through a Maximalist way of inquiries. His work encompasses architectural drawings, paintings, moving images, photogrammetry, augmented reality (AR) drawings, virtual reality (VR) paintings, and games.

Qiangs practice often revolves around the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), which have become an idiosyncratic research methodology within his distinct aesthetic spectrum. Qiangs work is often referred to as architectural Maximalism, oscillating between physical and virtual spaces in the contexts of ACG (Anime, Comic and Games) and fandom.

Pete Jiadong Qiang is currently a PhD student in arts and computational technology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was trained as an architect (RIBA Part 2) in Architectural Association School of Architecture.

For How Do We Begin?, Qiang exhibited Queer Maximalism HyperBody as a research ideal that tries to establish a new inventive methodology of Queer Maximalism: virtual space-making within the game engine by incorporating materials and images from ACG (Anime, Comic and Games), fandom communities and autoethnography. Both visually and acoustically, this new entanglement will try to redefine the concept of Portal within multiple HyperBodies intermediating between physical and virtual spaces.

HyperBodies include virtual Portal and physical Portal. HyperBody Virtual Portal is the virtual space of Queer Maximalism output in game engines, and is the corresponding physical space of Queer Maximalism output in real life.

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