Qiu Jia: How to Make Objects Stand

洞 HOL presents a solo exhibition by artist Qiu Jia, How to Make Objects Stand, opening May 2026. Centered on the deceptively simple yet fundamentally charged question of "standing," the artist unfolds a sustained inquiry into the relationships between objects, structure, body, and site.

Qiu Jia works persistently with materials that carry traces of use and the weight of time — wood, plaster, worn tabletops, table legs, roof beams. For him, these are not neutral media but things possessed of their own histories, gravities, and ethical stakes. In his practice, he does not seek to transform them wholesale into some predetermined image; instead, through co-construction, negotiation, and contingency, he allows objects of disparate origin to find temporary equilibrium and new modes of existence within newly formed relations.

The exhibition title points simultaneously to the most elementary physical problem of sculpture and to the artist's deeper working method. In Qiu Jia's work, "standing" does not mean arriving at a stable, closed form — it is more like allowing a constellation of things to prop and constrain one another at a critical threshold, achieving a provisional state of coherence through a kind of mutual misuse. The logic of support, modes of connection, material traces, and the structural sense of precariousness together constitute the core language of the work.

A group of works in the exhibition — composed by recombining table legs and roof beams — concentrates this approach. Table legs once served the everyday order of a tabletop; roof beams belonged to the load-bearing skeleton of a building. Severed from their original functions and reassembled together, they appear to have been drawn by chance into a shared relational field. They retain the familiar scale of lived life while simultaneously transforming into something estranged and tense — a spatial installation that hovers between the recognizable and the uncanny. Viewers may sense something structurally familiar, yet find themselves unable to restore these objects to any prior use. This coexistence of the intimate and the strange places the work in a zone between functional collapse and formal emergence.

How to Make Objects Stand is not an answer to a technical question but a re-posing of the question of how things exist: when an object is severed from its original purpose — when its support is laid bare, its function dissolved (ignored, abandoned, fallen away) — and form must nonetheless persist, can it constitute itself anew, by other means? It is within this uncertain and open condition that Qiu Jia's work continues its ongoing investigation of the perception of things, the sedimentation of time, and the dynamics of spatial relation.