Cabinet of Confusion: Tongji Philip Qian's ‘non-solo’ solo exhibition 共作 / AND THEN SOME
- Cila Brosius
- Jun 10
- 6 min read
Have you ever walked into an exhibition, press release in hand, and within a few seconds, the written documents have already deceived you? Not maliciously, but in that particular contemporary-art-kind-of way, where explanation substitutes for visual experience. That was me at the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, staring at Tongji Philip Qian's latest solo show, titled 共作 / And Then Some, wondering if I had accidentally enrolled in a graduate seminar without a syllabus.
Let’s start with the subtitles of the exhibition, which read like a fever dream of academic accreditation — but with a knowing wink.
Works (mostly) from Tongji Philip Qian
Chosen (mostly) with Fan Ada Wang
Installed (in part) with McKinzie Trotta
Arranged (in part) with Si Tong
Even at this early stage, before immersing myself in the work, I was bombarded with information. 'Mostly.' 'In part.' These words had weaseled their way into what is conventionally presented as a clear distribution of labor (artist, curator, coordinator etc.) The press release prepares the visitors for 'inappropriateness' and 'unreasonability'. That labyrinth of procedural nuance sets the tone for the rest of the experience.
The Cabinet of Curiosity as Crime Scene
At the center of the room stands a double-sided wall, which Qian (钱同济) calls a 'cabinet of curiosity'. To me, it looks more like a bulletin board. It is pinned so densely with works — some by Qian, some by other artists, and some curated by a high school student (the daughter of Qian's close friend) — that the eye doesn't know where to land. One side features the young curator's arrangement, which includes several drawings (some by her own hand) alongside a photo of Qian's charismatic dog, Grappa. I had read elsewhere that Grappa stars in Qian's video Finding the Spiral Jetty (2024), in which the artist filmed Robert Smithson's famous earthwork from canine height by attaching two cameras to the dog's small body — one a Chinese device, the other American. Here in Beijing, that work appears as a video still. The press release is characteristically unhelpful about causality: did the drawings inspire the inclusion of the still, or was the still added to complement the drawings? By that point, I had also given up trying to decipher the map at the back of the press release — a jumble of numbers supposedly keyed to which work belongs to whom.
To me, the effect is less 'curiosity cabinet' and more an obsessive detective's evidence wall in a cold case. There's mystery in the clutter. But I struggle to shake the feeling that I must decode the exhibition rather than simply ride the wave of information and visuals.
Who Made What, and Why Should I Care?
Qian's central gambit is to dissolve the solo exhibition by flooding it with collaborators and borrowed objects. On paper, this is charmingly humble: no genius-artist here, just a network. In practice, it becomes a game of attribution — dazing and confusing more than it enlightens.
Take conceptual artist Jonathan Monk's receipt drawings: small sketches of famous artworks on restaurant receipts, sold for the price of the meal. To unravel these matryoshka-like meanings, you'd need prior knowledge or a private tour — because none of this is in the press release, unless you count the convoluted map I gave up on earlier on... Without that, you'd assume all of the works on the walls are Qian's own creations. This raises an interesting question: if the audience can't tell the difference between your work and someone else's, have you successfully dissolved authorship — or just demonstrated that the distinctions never mattered much to begin with?
Grandfathers, a cabinet, and pencil sharpeners
The most personal element in the show was also the most straightforward. For the first time, Qian decided to exhibit his maternal grandfather Meng Xianglin's meticulously collected pencil sharpeners. Here, they were displayed like museum specimens on white shelves. Nearby stood a wooden cabinet built by his partner's maternal grandfather, Zhang Xueyuan. Both grandfathers had passed. Both are maternal, meaning their family names, by tradition, do not continue with their surviving grandchildren.
These works and their arrangement stand in stark contrast to the cacophony of the central 'cubicle'. Here, the deceptive, conceptual machinery comes to a grinding halt, and something genuine surfaces: a quiet meditation on memory, loss, and the objects that outlast us.
Context Dependency, and the 'Murder' of the Real
The exhibition’s greatest weakness is what I suspected from the beginning: without an extraordinary amount of hand-holding, most of it reads as jargon. Qian installed no wall text — visually wise, but the entire elaborate apparatus of 'mostly', 'in part', Monk's receipt logic, and the transnational dog Grappa remains invisible to anyone who doesn't get a private tour. The average visitor will squint at the pencil sharpeners, glance at the shrine, and leave wondering why a pile of old stationery and a photograph of a dog with two cameras counts as an exhibition.
A simple video loop explaining the process would solve this without cluttering the walls. But perhaps that's the point. Clarity might kill the spell. Perhaps, more radically, Qian decided to 'murder the real', as Jean Baudrillard put it — generating a simulation of a solo show so convincingly that the original ceases to matter.[1] A simulacrum that doesn't just represent a solo show but replaces it entirely. With what? Just the idea of an exhibition. Remove that construct, and nothing remains but the ghostly whisper of an idea.
Conclusion
What I find remarkable is that Qian never fully steps into the role of artist or curator. He speaks of 'complicating' the one-person exhibition through subversion. I think of it as the artist tangling a knot until the rope becomes useless. In the end, Qian is an orchestrator — the author of a performance in which authorship is endlessly deferred. Piece by piece, each artwork is familiar: readymades, appropriations, conceptual gestures. Artists have been doing this for a long time. The compelling act lies in Qian going to great lengths to remove himself from his own work while still clinging ('mostly') to the title of author. That contradiction is the exhibition's engine — and its ceiling. With so many collaborators and so much noise, where is the artist? And at what point does that question stop being provocative and start being exhausting?
That orchestration, despite the absence of screens or cables, evokes the age of AI-generated images, fragmented attention, and outsourced creativity. As we grow accustomed to scrutinizing every image for authenticity, Qian's show trains that skepticism on authorship itself. For that fresh perspective — and for avoiding the usual hypertechnological tropes — I am genuinely grateful.
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