The Doubter, 2010

Qiu Anxiong’s The Doubter replaces the subject of Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793) with a synthetic chimpanzee, which lies limp in a bathroom-cage with a (fake) gun on the tile floor. Qiu uses this chimpanzee as a stand-in for humankind, reflecting upon the cost of revolution, through reference to the Age of Enlightenment and the death toll of the French Revolution. The two books in front of the chimpanzee are a Chinese copy of the bible and an English copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

© Shi Guorui