Bridging Media, Bridging Selves
How do artists move between different forms and materials without losing their voice? Chinese artist Zheqi Jia, who goes by Qii, offers a compelling answer through a practice that combines visual art and performance.
Her installations, paintings, and digital works create quiet, emotionally charged spaces. Her performances, by contrast, center on the body as a place where conflict, vulnerability, and release play out. For Qii, both are ways of exploring identity, memory, and presence.
This approach reflects her personal journey. As a young Asian woman balancing cultural traditions with life in the West, Qii uses art to reflect on the past and reshape it for today. Her work asks us how we express ourselves, carry what we’ve inherited, and choose what to hold onto or let go. Each piece opens a space where emotion, imagination, and physical experience meet.
Visual Art as Foundation: Tension, Collapse, and Growth
Qii began with traditional Chinese art training, learning draftsmanship and visual storytelling. Within this structured style, she developed a focus on emotional depth over technical precision. Her early paintings explored how women are portrayed in classical Chinese literature, especially in Jin Ping Mei, where desire, power, and pressure mix. Her figures-skeletal, twisted-felt less like studies of anatomy and more like portraits of inner struggle.
After moving to London to study for her MA at the University of the Arts London, her practice expanded in form and philosophy. She shifted her attention from two-dimensional surfaces to installation and sculptural work during this period, using materials to convey weight, memory, and feeling.
Shooting the Sun was a key shift. Constructed from tree branches, felt, and 3D-printed parts, the piece suspends organic and artificial fragments in midair, echoing the tension between collapse and emergence. Referencing Chinese mythology, the work evokes personal cycles of rupture and recovery, as Qii puts it: “when the past is gone and the future hasn’t arrived yet.”
Shooting the Sun, 2023, felt, branches, nylon, fishing Line (Photo by Luna Guo)
In Platform Loading, she explores the tension between nature and technology, spirit and matter. combines handmade and digital elements—clay, stone, and hand-painted textures—with modern materials such as 3D-printed fragments and game console buttons. Part-winged and partly rooted, a central hybrid figure stands at the center of this suspended space, embodying the dualities that run through much of her practice: ascension vs. grounding, stillness vs. movement, digital vs. ritual. The game interface components hint at a broader commentary on contemporary existence.
The idea of “loading” speaks to feeling in-between cultures, identities, or moments. Inspired by philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘rhizome’—a non-linear, multiplicity structure of knowledge and becoming. “Resisting fixed hierarchies, embracing fragmentation, and cultivating a network of meaning that unfolds through layered perception and open-ended transition.”. The tactile and symbolic layered composition speaks to an inner architecture of uncertainty and becoming. Viewers don’t simply view the piece—they enter it. The immersive environment suggests that myth, memory, and simulation are no longer separate domains but coexist in the same space. Like much of Qii’s work, it doesn’t offer neat answers. Instead, it invites us to pause and reflect on identity as something always changing.
Shooting the Sun, 2024, clay, canvas, watercolor, stone, woolen yarn
(Photo by Zheqi Jia)
Performance Art: The Body as Question and Answer
Qii sees performance as a natural extension of her visual art, another way to explore materials and emotions, but through movement and time. Her performances carry the same meaning and symbolism as her visual work, but they add unpredictability, repetition, and physical presence.
In Trying to Get Rid of (), Qii performs for three hours, wrapping herself in branches, fishing wire, and broken mirrors. What starts as a shelter becomes a trap. The more she tries to move, the more entangled she becomes. Her body, laboring in silence, performs a visceral transformation: the architecture of protection becomes the architecture of confinement. The empty parentheses in the title serve as a conceptual space for viewers to project their internal barriers, inherited burdens, or unnamed fears.
Trying to Get Rid of (), 2022 (Photo by Jhawadat)
If trying to Get Rid of () is quiet and inward, Mineral Novels is open and unpredictable. Created with artist Alex Pave and performed in the stone-lined courtyard of Ruthin Castle, the piece features blindfolded artists moving through a loose arrangement of scattered instruments. Sound, touch, and vibration become tools of orientation. A remote-controlled vehicle operates as a third presence, occasionally shifting the acoustic environment.
There’s no script, and the audience is invited to join in. The piece asks: how do we connect when we can’t rely on sight, identity, or expectations? Recognition becomes about intuition, shared space, and vulnerability. At a time when everything feels fast and hyper-visible, Mineral Novels slows things down. It welcomes uncertainty and makes space for quiet attention.
Mineral Novels, 2024 (Photo by Penghang Liu)
Practice in Motion
Across both visual and performance work, Qii explores what it means to be human in an uncertain world. She doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. Instead, she embraces contradiction, fragmentation, and complexity.
Her art raises questions like: When does protection become a cage? How do rituals and routines shape who we are? How can we connect without control, or experience the world without trying to define it?
For Qii, complexity isn’t something to avoid-it’s something to respect. At a time when artists often feel pressure to present a clear, marketable identity, she chooses to stay fluid. Her work resists simple labels, not to be obscure, but to stay true to lived experience.
To witness Qii’s work is to follow someone in motion-feeling, questioning, and reshaping herself through art. Her practice doesn’t just show us something, it invites us in, asking us to reflect, feel, and imagine alongside her.
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