Meet the Beijing-Based Artist Who Turned His 14-Day Quarantine Into a Mind Map

Tom Arnstein | Apr 22, 2020 3:39 pm | Add a comment | 1136 reads

While quarantine for many of us was the perfect excuse to laze at home, think about starting an exercise routine, and excavate cupboards for foodstuffs last seen circa winter 2014, the forced confinement of British artist Gareth Fuller presented a particularly unique challenge. For a man who usually busies himself exploring cities – as well as the entirety of the Sixth Ring Road – by foot, the Beijing-based artist had to instead make do with summoning inspiration from four walls and his circling mind.

The result is a collection of 14 sketches titled The Quarantine Maps as well as a standalone "Quarantine + Pandemic Survival Map," which capture Fuller's day-to-day experience of captivity, mapping out humorous tidbits, news-regurgitated soundbites, and occasional exasperation that will be familiar to anyone who recently lived through the docile-in-body, frayed-in-mind quarantine existence.

The maps feature Fuller's signature psychogeography style, which is as playful as it is detailed and invites the viewer on a journey into emotive mental threads through recognizable and sprawling locations. This autobiographical method intrinsically suits the controlled nature of quarantine, where 2D paper and its four defined boundaries reflect a person's spatial restrictions and the paper's contents and scope are only as limited as the artist's imagination and creativity. The result is a world of introspective musings to get lost in, each shaped by a feeling of helplessness, anxiety, and uncertainty but which never lose sight of small daily pleasures and an eventual end to the madness.

Now out of quarantine, Fuller, in collaboration with the British Chamber of Commerce, will present his latest works via a webinar this Friday, 4-5pm. The Beijinger is honored to have teamed up as the official media sponsor for the event, and our readers are privy to 50 percent off the RMB 50 registration fee – just enter the code BCCCTBJ2020 at checkout. Find out more here or by scanning the QR code in the poster below.