Qiu Zhijie: Qiu Zhijie Is an Artist, Writer, Curator, and Educator, Based in Beijing and Hangzhou. A Major Retrospective of His Work Opens This Coming Fall at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai

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1 JOSEPH BEUYS'S FINAL SPEECH In January 1986, eleven days before his death, Joseph Beuys gave a speech as he accepted the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize in Duisburg, Germany. He said that Lehmbruck had taught him not only to understand sculpture in spatial terms, but also to take spiritual power as the fundamental motive behind the act of giving form. Beuys connected this notion to his own ideas about political reform and social evolution. The influence of Beuys's integrated concept of art is well known, but what interests me most here are Beuys's insights into how concepts are transmitted and passed on through generations. He saw any two individual lives as the medium for the transmission of a concept, and from this basic understanding of how humans influence one another, he formulated the idea of an intimate connection between a given human and humanity writ large. When I first read Beuys's lecture in late 1989, it helped me come to terms with the massive social trauma my generation had faced earlier that year, and healed my personal wounds.

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2 ZHUANGZI The great ancient Chinese Taoist thinker Zhuangzi used lively tales …