A weathered, green train car—typical of the ubiquitous vehicles that traversed China’s railways throughout the latter half of the twentieth century—sits motionless on the concrete floor. The room is dark, but flickering lights emanate from the windows of the train. The visitor is drawn to the entrance at the rear of the car, and finds the interior immaculately clean, but is nevertheless overwhelmed by the physically uncomfortable exaggeration of a genuine train ride. The window over each of the twenty-four seating compartments has been replaced with a projection screen, and as many unique video loops continuously illuminate the windows. Some of the footage comes from historical archival documentation of the bloodiest and most brutal moments of the past century of East Asian history; some appears to come from World War II- and Cultural Revolution-era propaganda footage; some mimics contemporary footage of the view from a train window; some recalls the artist’s own serial ink painting with hand drawn animations of maps and diagrams. At the same time, twelve audio loops cycle through the public announcement system, entirely out of sync with the synthetic scenery projected onto the windows. Some of the music might be traditional folk songs, while other tracks seem like experimental sound art.

Confronted by this excess of sensory experience, the viewer is suddenly struck by the realization that she is, indeed, staring into amnesia. Via video editing techniques, the images with which she is inundated have been stripped of all context. They have been torn from history, removed from their original narratives, and presented as isolated instances of violence and memory. At the same time, they have also been released from their filmic origin, having been rearranged into new sequences and stripped of all sound. The figurative images and abstract soundtrack are forced into conflict, erasing the false logic of progress and certainty. The time and space behind the historical phantasmagoria playing across the windows have vanished, both violently and silently. Origin disappears, along with the ability to make sense of these images by circumscribing their flattened landscapes and inserting their characters into a definable and recognizable semiotic position.

Through this project, Qiu Anxiong interrogates the relationship between past, present, and future on a cultural matrix that is at once both spatial and temporal, questioning the roles of memory and imagination in our perceptions of the passage of time. Particular images within the train interact with others unpredictably, further reinforcing the subjective nature of memory and questioning this phenomenology of experience. When the sound tracks are also taken into account, this audiovisual experience seems to simultaneously create and reject an imagined history. All of these images, like the physical environment in which they are installed, have been absorbed into the collective memory of several generations—some who directly experienced these historical events, and some who have only read about them in history textbooks. Authenticity, however, is rejected by the cleansing of amnesia: this tangible archive of affect releases its surplus and empties into a vacuum at the far end of the train. When facing this black hole of imagined memory, the role of the viewer is that of the contemporary subject: to untangle the various strands of life and layers of signification, to trace them back to a nonexistent origin, to separate the modern from the historical, the fantastic from the lived, the vanished from the new.

Originally entitled Memory for Forgetting, the piece forces its audience to remember—or to invent a forged memory—just to forget it, to reject it, to deconstruct its ephemeral presence by making it physical and leaving it behind. It might not be too much of a stretch to call the work China’s definitive dialogue with the Euro-American tradition of relational aesthetics, forcing viewers into a vigorous struggle with their own memories, with the mediated images with which they have been inundated, and finally wit h each other. Far from mimicking the projects Bourriaud describes under this theoretical rubric, however, Qiu Anxiong seems to be working in a rather different intellectual strain: that paradox of continental philosophy known affectionately as religion without religion. It seems strangely appropriate, as China has itself been caught in the grips of a series of secular or quasi-secular religions and anti-religions for a sizable portion of its own history; perhaps the lessons of post-Christian Europe are more applicable in confronting Chinese history are more viable than might be readily assumed.

Jacques Derrida writes often of “the gift of death” and its relationally necessary counterpart “the work of mourning.” These two positions are not separated into a subject-object dichotomy, but rather rest on the same plane of active passivity. In both cases, the task is that of moving on; not of lingering over the body of the dead—here manifested as the image, transformed into light and refracted via the medium of celluloid memory—but of leaving corporeality behind. This is a fundamentally religious perspective; the moment of secular religion appears only when nothing exists beyond this ephemerality. The work of mourning, then, is letting go of a pressing nostalgia for a nonexistent origin, which requires a letting go of language. In Staring into Amnesia, Qiu Anxiong has already completed this first step: he destroys the linear logic of language, of the textual sign, and instead replaces it with the twisted semiotic renderings of filmic code. This translation does not, of course, eliminate language, but it does prepare the viewer to complete her own task—that of recognizing the impossibility of entrusting memory to narrative.

If Derrida supplies a framework through which the piece might be read, it is Michel de Certeau who offers a conceptually interesting non-resolution. In his essay “The Weakness of Believing,” the philosopher writes: “…the ‘follow me’ comes from a voice which has been effaced, forever irrecoverable.” Although he intends to refer t the Christian impetus towards blind faith, his words are unintentionally provocative in the context of Chinese collective memory. Moreover, his analysis of the origins of belief is even more prescient. Certeau defined the signifying event of faith not as death or resurrection, but rather as the empty tomb. This “signifying event,” which corresponds to the event-based historical narrative demolished by Qiu Anxiong’s video projections, might better be translated into this theoretical space as a simple turning point, or perhaps even as a moment of slippage. This moment, in which the work of theological deconstruction occurs, is a turn from mourning to emptiness; from belief in the call of language to recognition of the specters of imagination.

After confronting the black hole at the far end of the train—the blank wall that signified all that is lost and all that is gained by the rejection of imagined experienced and the cleansing of memory—the viewer steps back into the prosaic space of the exhibition hall. She refuses to look back. That which is left behind remains behind. The empty tomb cannot recover any value as a source of belief without affirming its very origin as emptiness—and an empty origin, of course, is no origin at all. The train is empty. Those who utilized its potential for motion have themselves passed on, from corporeality into the play of light that flickers along the interior walls of the train car. Their voices have been followed along the narrow passageway through the middle of the compartment, but they themselves are absent. Nothing remains to be seen. The tomb is empty.