Miao Xiaochun: Microcosm – A Modern Allegory

　　Huang Du Curator

　　Miao Xiaochun is considered one of the most representative artists in the domain of China’s new media art. His recent works seem to be a stimulant to the slow-going Chinese contemporary art circle—we have the confidence that a new value order is building in the process of returning to academics.

　　Miao Xiaochun’s work Microcosm employed the latest three-dimensional computer technology to create many montage images and virtual realities. His way of expression is based on subjective interpretations of historic artworks, especially by taking the classic paintings around the Renaissance as the structure for visual expressions. Although Miao Xiaochun’s Microcosm is based on Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, he turned the traditional Chinese idiom “looking up the sky from the well” into “looking down the well from the sky” (this is the literary translation of “Microcosm”). If the idiom “looking up the sky from the well” is used to descript a person with limited sight and knowledge who has difficulty in understanding the nature of things, then “looking down the well from the sky” means if a person is put into a macro environment to examine micro things, he would have difficulties to understand the nature of things too. In these two phrases, the spectator’s positions are changed, but he encounters the same limits in understanding things, which shows the significance of this work. Microcosm is not to rebuild the trueness of historic image, rather it is to reinterpret and convert the historic image and derive new meanings from the image spectrum, or to de-structure the historic meaning by using an artist’s own emotions, or to take care of and translate the target from personal visual experiences, so as to create a psychological medium analysis—to recompile modern images in the tangled relations among reality and virtual reality, familiarity and strangeness, closeness and alienation and individualism and non-individualism. In his works, we can see the mutual reflection, interconnection, overlapping and replacement between historic images and real images, western aesthetics and Chinese aesthetics, classic painting and new media art, humans and things, wars and peace and violence and pastoral. In these processes, an abstract piece is recreated that both attract us and puzzle us.

　　This is a baroque style — grand and spectacular.

　　This is a pure modern version of allegories…

　　On February 8, 2009, Miao Xiaochun and I had an impressive talk. It is impressive because not only that the talk touched all the above mentioned subjects, more interestingly, we two are both art practitioners with the same background but different approaches—it is a talk between an artist and a curator both with the background of art history. Different experiences constituted the contents of this talk, including the fundamentals for judging art history and different interpretations of modern art, the insight of a curator and the practical description of an artist, and the discussion on differences between western and eastern aesthetics and the art philosophical analysis in a social context.

　　Huang Du (thereafter referred to as Huang): Your works have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. They have been exhibited in many important domestic and foreign museums and art projects and have received various comments and remarks. However, few people actually know about your experience, such as your education backgrounds and how do you become what you are today. I think people are always curious about artists’ experiences, hence it might be necessary for you to explain your experience to readers, audiences and art fans. As far as I know, you studied German, then shifted to art history research, then gave up art history for painting, then went to study in Germany, then gave up painting for photography and then did a lot multi-media creations. Could you briefly descript the whole process?

　　Miao Xiaochun (thereafter referred to as Miao): The reason why I studied German is because I didn’t get into any art academies. That’s why I studied German literature in my undergraduate years. But I found that I was still interested in arts, so I applied to study art history in China Central Academy of Fine Arts for a master’s degree. After graduation, I spent some years painting. In 1996, I went to Kassel Academy of Art to study plastic art. In Germany, I opened my views and stepped into many areas. My graduation work “Culture Shock” is the combination of photography and sculpture. I also spent a relatively long time doing photographs, from the time I was in Germany to now. Since 2005, I have become more and more interested in arts created by digital medium especially by computer software. That’s why I made The Last Judgment in Cyberspace that year. After 2005, I have been adopting this method all the time . The series of Microcosm shown in this exhibition is also made by three-dimensional software. That’s roughly the whole process.

　　Huang: For a period, you focused your photography on objective reality: China’ rapid development and changes. Especially since late 1990s or since the twenty-first century, China’s urbanization process has picked up huge momentum, spreading from the super-big cities (Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou) to second tier cities (Suzhou, Nanjing, Changsha, Chengdu etc). I found that what were showed in your photos were things closely related to urbanization. Because modern urbanization involves many political, social and cultural uncertainties (frictions, conflicts and events), you recorded these urban changes in your photos. Of course, the “record” was not a very strict objective record; it contained both realities recording and subjective analysis of realities. My question is why did you choose this perspective?

　　Miao: Urbanization is the subject that I have been pursuing since 1999 when I returned to China from Germany. The works shown in “Urban Creation”- Shanghai Biennale 2002 and “New Urban Reality” in Netherlands(Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2006) were all about cities. In recent two or three decades, the changes brought by urbanization are too huge for artists to ignore. That’s why I spend seven or eight years doing the same subject. I use photography because photos can better reflect these changes. But just as you have mentioned before, there are also subjective factors. They are not pure objective recording. I prefer to make photography like painting, because pure photography can only represent a fragment of events, for they are just pieces of the real world. I like to make something with big scale and grand scene and to integrate all the pieces into the grand scene. Then the spectators themselves can find out these pieces.

　　Huang: You tried to capture a historic moment and a real history. Then how did you handle the relationship among recording, reality and realism?

　　Miao: Among all art media, photography has the most natural feature of recording realities. No matter how many subjective factors you add to it, it still has something to do with reality. Photography and reality are inseparable. Painting can start from internal feelings, but photography can only be started from reality. I respect this. Even though I want to make my works like frescos, yet all details are real. I try my best to accurately reflect all details in the real world.

　　Huang: Going back to your early photography works. At the early days, you did not photograph pure real objective targets. You did not adopt Jeff Wall’s staged photography. Rather, you conducted object photography first, which is more similar to Andreas Gursky’s manner. But you were still different from Gursky, because it seems that you employed cavalier or scattered perspective in post-production. My question is how did your post-production lead to the differences between you and Gursky?

　　Miao: The early stage of photographing is completely objective and real, because I think there is a bottom line in photography. At first, there should not be too much fancy deeds, just photographing what is in front of you. While in the post-production, you can re-organize and re-compile the pictures according to your subjective feelings. If I am recording an instant through photography, then through post-production, I can change the nature of times. For example, a same person can appear in different places in a photographed picture. This is different from traditional photography in terms of times, a little like video-recording: putting a person’s actions in different times within a picture, thus changing the instant nature of photography. This is the first point. The second point is that the traditional photography is usually confined by the physical features of equipment. Take the angle of view for example; it is only the angle of a certain camera. But through post-production, the angles can be changed. By that time, the original complete linear perspective of photography is changed to somewhat like cavalier or scattered perspective.

　　I think the western art circle does not have the tradition of cavalier perspective. Andreas Gursky might not think this way: I have to change it in perspective. In addition, he might not be used to changing the instant feeling of photography to put different times in a picture. This might make him uncomfortable. But for a Chinese artist, because of the tradition of cavalier perspective, and because different times of a same person can appear in a picture, he might feel natural to employ cavalier perspective. In ancient Chinese paintings, the same figure can appear in different places, such as walking from bridge to pavilion, drinking with friends there and then climbing up mountain… Therefore, in a scroll, people’s behaviors in different times can all be put there. I follow this mindset while making photographs. In my work Celebration, there are many people appearing in different places to demonstrate the changes of times.

　　Huang: This is the most fundamental principle that defines our difference with western artists. In other words, the principle of narration is different in Chinese arts and western arts. The aesthetics in traditional Chinese art means the completeness of a story constituted with repeatedly showing one figure in different places which forms a story line.

　　Miao: Right. It emphasizes more on subjective feelings. I did come from the foot of a mountain to its top. I have gone through this process, thus it is natural to put the pieces together. When I saw the scenes, I feel like I see the whole story. Hence it is an expression method which focuses on subjective feelings, and is employed in photography even though photography should be objective.

　　Huang: In your work Celebration, the repeated appearance of the same characters in different places is the concrete implementation of traditional Chinese painting aesthetics. What purpose did you try to achieve through the repeats?

　　Miao: Spectators of this work may feel like they have stayed there for three hours to watch the celebration from the beginning to the end. The first glance may make you feel that it has just caught an instant. But if you examine it carefully, you may realize it is not the case.

　　Huang: The conformation of photography before 2005 was: an objective reality (Miao’s words: an objective presentation) and an internal world constituting a photography language. After 2005, you initiated a change, turning to analyze and dissect some classic western paintings by some famous painters, such as Netherlands’ Hieronymus Bosch, and Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment—the most famous painting during the Renaissance. Why did you choose historic artworks as targets to dissect?

　　Miao: Facing a real and changing world, I have the desire to record it and freeze it, but not to analyze it, dissect it, or to re-present it. But for the works that record the past, I indeed have the interest to analyze and illustrate it, to make it solid and alive again.

　　Art has provided a lot of materials for us to recreate. Fortunately, we are vastly different from ancient people. When they were creating artworks, they had nothing to refer to. For example, when they were making cave frescos, they could not take reference from anything. When they were drawing an ox, they just draw it according to the image they got from life. For them, they probably had no sense of art history at all.

　　But when we are making creations now, we can start either from real world or from the art world which goes parallel with the former. We can learn something from art history. This is the interesting part.

　　So now we have a long history of art, where there are so many things which we can use as raw materials for recreation. When we are doing this, we do not have to worry that these things are from western art history. We do not have to think whether they are in the art history of China, or of Netherlands, or of Italy, or of Germany, or of Britain. To us, they are just cultural legacy left by our predecessors.

　　What I chose are complex works in western art history, no matter they are about structure or characters, such as Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment and Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. I am thinking that as an oriental, I am more courageous than western artists. Provided there is an Italian artist, when he is re-interpreting Michelangelo’s works, what would he think, would he feel afraid? But I remembered that when I was doing a three-dimensional work based on this, I felt very happy, without any sense of burden. Maybe it is the unknowing that makes me bold.

　　Huang: In fact, some artists rely on their intuition for creation; some rely on their accumulation of knowledge, experience and judgment. The reason why you choose famous western artists as analyzing targets is still related to your experience on art history research. Without that as a basis, it is hard for you do decide which artwork to choose. I think this might be a difference.

　　Miao: It might be one of the reasons.