Miao Xiaochun and His H2O 　　　　　 Wu Hung
　　

　　 Miao Xiaochun’s newest art project, H2O- A Study of Art History, contemplates on the continuity and metamorphoses of life and art. Philosophically it responds to a question he posed in his previous project, The Last Judgment in Cyberspace.¹As indicated by the title of a video in that project, the question is “Where will we go?” after human history. Using the technique of computer animation, the video features a person---a digital reconstruction of the artist himself---traversing the vast cosmic space inside Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Like a lost shooting star, he emerges from the depths of cyberspace and transforms into an infinite number of identical figures, both the divinities and the mortal beings who once lived. In Christian eschatology, on the day of the Last Judgment, every man and woman will present him or herself before Jesus Christ to have their conduct reviewed by their Lord. The meritorious ones will ascend to Heaven; the sinful ones will descend to Hell. But in Miao Xiaochun’s computer animation, all the figures finally disperse, vanishing into the shapeless space from which they originally came. Their origins are beyond our knowledge and their future destinations are totally unknown. The video thus does not offer an answer to the question “Where will we go?” ---but only raises it. On the other hand, by erasing any difference between Heaven and Hell and making all divine and human images identical, the artist effectively rejects the traditional Christian solution. Constancy and continuity, not differentiation and hierarchy, underlie the narrative structure and visual presentation of the computer animation. In this way, this work bridges The Last Judgment in Cyberspace and H2O-A Study of Art History, because constancy and continuity now appear as the explicit theme of the later project. This also explains why Miao Xiaochun focuses on H2O , a natural element which he believes best embodies these two concepts. He explains this idea in a “self-statement” about this project:
　　　 I really don’t know where I was from or where I will go, but I know many