With this third solo exhibition at the Walsh Gallery since 2004, Beijing-based Miao Xiaochun has become a Chicago regular. Titled H2O: A Study of Art History, the show consisted of sixteen large digital prints and one computer animation. As in previous work, Miao uses the popular graphics application 3ds Max to recreate and animate canonical Renaissance tableaux. In each, water either figures centrally as a motif: for example, Giotto’s Washing of the Feet at Padua, Cranach the Elder’s Fountain of Youth, and Poussin’s Landscape with Diogenes. Or it is made to figure centrally through adaptation: Pollaiuolo’s Saint Sebastian bleeds crystalline beads and a Sistine Adam rouses upon liquid infusion, while floating through outer space in a bubble.

The works themselves emphasize water as an animating, purifying, and regenerative force within a symbiotic environmental order. Wall and catalogue texts reinforce these notions. In the catalogue, in an interview with Wu Hung, curator of the exhibition, Miao states, “the water I drink today has flowed through millions of years, through countless of living beings, cycling through everything, and after it leaves me, it will continue to stream through millions of years, into countless living forms, sinking into the earth, going into the sky, and moving back and forth.” As such, H20 is a symbolist project with romantic underpinnings.

However, there is evidence of slight ambivalence. The still images come in sets of two: one replicating the composition of the source material, the other elevated in a bird’s eye perspective that opens up new spaces, unrepresented in the originals, to sight and figuration. Placed into those pockets are little signs of the carnivalesque: dogs and cats frolicking, washing, sniffing, or peeing, as well as happenings of human merrymaking. Most of the figures are nude, and all are portraits of the artist himself, smoothed and abstracted through computer generation. The effect is comic. As a result, art historical appropriation is cast as parody. But at no point does the joke seem directed at Miao’s own romantic environmental notions. Despite the surrounding humour, his own earnest embrace of symbolism is intended to compel.

But it does not. For, after all, water is foremost, particularly in modern China, host to signs of the leviathan. Iron bridges, spanning kilometres over the Yangtze, stand as Olympian feats of state engineering. Elsewhere, a twenty-two thousand megawatt dam boasts of powering urban and industrial hypertrophy, while upriver settlements are displaced and geography reshaped, and downriver field and stream fill with fatal factory fecal matter. Despite this looming stage of environmental ruin, Miao floats tropes of aqua vita on par with the copy of Evian or Poland Spring. At best, H20 is a romantic project beset with delusion. More likely, it is simply unconcerned with the history or present-day charge of its core symbols.



Then, what about The Deluge? It is rid of Michelangelo’s bright palette, coloured instead ash and coal but for the brassy glow that illuminates the floodwater’s refugees in a stagey light of hope. The companion image is, like the others, from on high, showing choppy grey stormwaters extending up and over a horizon that, for its low placement, reads as the edge and end of a flat earth. But if this tableau is an allegory of history, it is not via subject matter. It tells instead through facture. In these large digital printouts, only the rare pixel can be discerned. Scenography is likewise impressive: landscape and objects are rendered lushly and meticulously. Given such high production values, it is clear that Miao has at his disposal a flotilla of able designers and an enviable cache of computer technology. This technical finish is in strong contrast to the project’s intellectual languor, marked by romantic indulgences and a leisurely plundering of art history. These are not uncommon features in contemporary Chinese art. The privilege of the market, hot for Chinese product, has alleviated the burden of critical discourse, and not just for this artist.


Author's bio: Ryan Holmberg is Visiting Assistant Professor in Japanese Art History at the University of Chicago.



Photo credit:

(Top)Miao Xiaochun, The Deluge, 2007, 338 x 240 cm, edition of 8, c-print. Courtesy of Walsh Gallery and the artist.


(Bottom) Miao Xiaochun, The Deluge, 2007, 175 x 480 cm, four panels, 175 x 120 cm each, edition of 8, c–print. Courtesy of Walsh Gallery and the artist.