Huang: I read your personal profile and there was an interesting self description: Bosch’s art is only one of “my starting points. I actually do not particularly care about what Bosch’s work is intended to show. What I want to reflect is the soul of the work. This is more important, or else I would be an art historian rather than an artist. My works do not descript the contents of Bosch’s work, I only use the form of Bosch’s work to express my own thoughts.”… My question is “I want to reflect the soul of the work”…?

　　Miao: This is probably a version translated from English to Chinese. It does not exactly reflect my meaning. I have a Chinese version and the main message is like this: What Bosch created was based on the allegories of his time. There were many details, each of which reflected an allegory. Actually 90% of Bosch’s allegories were beyond my understanding. What I want to say is that I may not have to understand them all. I am not doing art history research. I heard that some people have done a thorough research on all Bosch’s allegories and have written a thick book about them, with each allegory marked with its origin. But I have to create it with my own language and to swap all the contents with modern things and make it a modern story. This can reflect my view and feeling in our times. I think the final story is like this: I do not understand Bosch’s work and the meaning it represents; but if Bosch would look at my works, he could not understand mine either. He would not be able to understand many things, such as this spaceship which can fly into the sky, but is was not in existence in his times. If he had looked at my works, he might ask what this monster is. There are many weird creatures in his works, making his works like dreams. I can not understand them, and I do not intend to. He may not understand my metaphors and thoughts either. But I feel this is more interesting.

　　We just express our own things. He stated his times, thoughts and feelings and I voice my own. I think they go in parallel. His works are my starting points where I used his structure, such as his structure of heaven, earth and hell and the basic forms of his pictures. But I only use these forms and changed all contents, including figures, backgrounds and all facilities. What I create belong to our times, they are mine.

　　He dreamed his dreams and I do mine.

　　Huang: That’s good then. You only adopted the structure of Bosch’s painting and his narrative pattern (Miao: yes, you are right). You actually compiled another set of allegories. Then what are the meanings of your allegories?

　　Miao: They are modern people’s dreams. They reflect modern people’s views on life and death, their desires and their view on human’s weakness.

　　We can make some comparisons. Take the Dance of Death for example. In his painting, there was a person shaped like a tree, and a group of people danced on his head. I can not figure out what these people represent. My Dance of Death happened on a laptop computer and a skeleton danced there, an image that did not exist in Bosch’s times. If we are going to have nuclear wars, the final command might be sent by pressing a button. Bosch could not imagine that the command could be sent by a computer, neither can he imagine powerful weapons of our times which have the capacity of destroying the earth hundreds of times. Therefore my Dance of Death is like this: on a laptop computer, Death dancing, nuclear war starting, total destruction… It is totally a fear of modern people and concerns of modern people.

　　Huang: That means this artwork that you create is actually a “transposition”?

　　Miao: Yes. Especially the concepts concerning Adam and Eve are changed, which is the most difficult part: because this work only employed “a single” three-dimensional model and this model is a male who can not represent both men and women. Therefore finally I came up with such an idea: use a robot to represent Adam and Venus for Eve. My consideration is: we modern people are just like god in the way that we create a lot of robots according to our will and ask them to do as we direct. In this perspective, it is like god creating Adam and Eve and telling Adam that he should follow his rules. Next is Venus. Why do we always think the Venus with broken arms in Louvre museum is the most beautiful one? I think one possibility is that this Venus does not have arms, which means she can not pick the forbidden fruit as Eve did. From this point of view, this image can be used to replace Eve and reflect the thoughts of modern people.

　　There are many such cases in my work, and I have to do the same work in every detail.

　　Huang: This work actually has some features that are the same as the ones in Bosch’s work. Though their meanings are different, yet both of them have something identical and immortal.

　　Miao: Right.

　　Huang: For example, I think to exhibit the process from birth to death and to look down the hell from heaven, look up the heaven from the hell, look at the end from the beginning or look back at the beginning from the end are the meanings of this work. Even though you present or metaphor modern reality or your philosophy of looking forward to the future, this work in the whole still has the same things as the ones in Bosch’s work. It is only that the space and time are changed….

　　Miao: Right, the structure. In terms of birth, death, heaven, earth and hell, their general structures are similar, but with different view points. In Bosch’s work, the heaven, earth and hell go in parallel or one after another. They may also go along with the time. But through the nine screens and after three-dimensional transposition, they developed a tangled relationship. By using the relation between side screens and front screens, we can look down the hell from heaven and look up the heaven from the hell. This is no longer a parallel structure, it is a tangled structure. There is a co-relation. Through the side screens, the three spaces are linked together.

　　The issues under discussion are the same, such as birth and death. But the ways of observing them are different.

　　Huang: The difference is: you use a modern technology to rebuild it, and by doing this you actually change the relation and form between times and spaces. In traditional western art, there is always something called “logos”, which means “logic”. It started from ancient Greek civilization, then gradually developed and evolved into “contradiction”, or binary opposition. I think, as a Chinese artist, your job is not to make the logos (or logic) or binary opposition as the targets of expression or analysis, but to abstract and express the chaos, ambiguity and co-relation in Chinese aesthetics. It is just like why we do not consider yin and yang as oppositions (Miao: right). Is this also the position where you start your consideration?

　　Miao：I think this is the most interesting part. In a western view, objects are positioned either up or down and things are either good or bad. But for me... In fact, when Chinese create artworks, they have a subconscious believing that a good thing is not necessarily 100% good and a bad thing is not necessarily completely bad. Then conflicting ideas appear in artworks, or maybe something different from complete logic might exist. I found this when I first started doing The Last Judgment in Cyberspace. When I did the transposition of one model replacing all characters in Michelangelo’s artwork, I suddenly realized that there is no distinction between good people and bad people here --- because I used the same model: who is good? Who is bad? Then there is no difference between heaven and hell, or even up and down. At that time, I suddenly felt that I can tolerate this; I can tolerate this confused feeling. Thinking back, looking at the deep-rooted reasons, this is related to Chinese philosophy, just like you have mentioned.

　　Therefore, I could take a modern medium to create artworks; I could take a western artwork as an element to elaborate; but subconsciously there are still a lot of Chinese elements and oriental elements.

　　Huang: Therefore, from a modern perspective, you interpret the narrative principles in the works of famous painters. The metaphor of the interpretation—a modern met