Double Interface – Miao Xiaochun's RESTART

By Ursula Panhans-Bühle

Translated by Daniel Hoheisel

Within the short period of circa five years Miao Xiaochun developed a stunning thematically, technically, and artistically complex work in the young field of computer-generated 3D animation. The initial point of departure was the 2005 translation of Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" into a three-dimensional space that made it possible to view static, photographic prints from various points of view. These, in turn, were complemented by an animated journey through this space entitled "The Last Judgment in Cyberspace". For the 3-D reproduction of the more than 400 figures in Michelangelo's colossal fresco Miao Xiaochun decided on one single figure as their basis: his own person, stripped of socio-cultural and temporal characteristics, that is, stripped of clothing. In doing so, he placed in the forefront a nakedness – especially as a Chinese – that even Michelangelo's provocative nudity remains in the shadows, all the while avoiding any idealized reverence for the body itself. In addition, the choice of grisaille tones for the 3-D space – in analogy to black and white photography – and the emotional neutrality of the figure rules out any suggestion of exhibitionist egocentrism.

"The Last Judgment in Cyberspace" was followed by the 2007 work "H2O  – Genesis", a silent 3-D journey through the cosmic night, fascinating the viewer with the beauty of large raindrops saturated with reflected light and bluish aetheric aureole characterized by a metaphorically very special transfer of our elixir of life: water. The point of departure for the artistic investigation of this medium – flowing through every living thing – was Miao Xiaochun's fascination with Lucas Cranach the Elder's painting "Fountain of Youth", an iconographically singular work from the middle of the 16th century that transforms the Christian, religious idea of the fountain of youth into a heathen classical antiquity. Under the aegis of Venus, accompanied by her son Amor (Cupid), old women undergo a metamorphosis walking through a fountain of youth whose water magically returns them to a youthful beauty. Here too the ubiquitous figure of himself from his first 3-D work complex "The Last Judgment in Cyberspace" forms the iconographic medium of the 3-D transformation of the painting.  The result is a peculiar shift in the meaning of Cranach's model: There it was the privilege of the women to undergo rejuvenation, while here it is always the same, male figure that suggests a timelessness, still retaining a subtle counterpoint when the figure is also found standing on the pillar of Venus carefully holding a young child stretching into the distance. The theme of water, in its life-giving role as well as its life-threatening violence, led the artist to choose a series of further pictures from European painting of the Renaissance and Baroque. Color prints from the 3-D reconstructions of these paintings were printed, complemented by prints from different points of view that an altered camera angle in 3-D space makes possible.

The next project, "Microcosm", realized in 2008/9, engages with Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights". Miao Xiaochun did not merely translate the enigmatic characteristics of this work into a contemporary counterpoint. He simultaneously used the possibilities of 3-D transformation to "remold", as he has called it, the temporally ill-fated progression of the pictures in the triptych – from paradise through the garden of earthly delights to hell – as a time-space simultaneity that holds open the relations between the past, present, and future, between our desires and ominous catastrophes – something that may be closer to him as Chinese and that, apart from this, resembles a point of view that cannot be completely excluded from Bosch's hermetic work. Above all Miao Xiaochun has immersed himself in a whole new manner artistically and analytically into the conditions and possibilities of virtual 3-D construction and 3-D visualization. In this way he created a work complex that not only contains the elaborated 3-D animation "Microcosm", but also a wealth of photographic prints that artistically utilize the entire spectrum of the creation of a 3-D animation. For example, he has made ink-jet print-outs of the lattice structures used in the construction of an ensemble of figures in 3-D space with their multiple layers as seen from our perspective. The resulting overlap of clear lineaments and blotchy blackened marks allows him to successfully visually combine the characteristics of traditional Chinese ink drawing. Different colored marks from the lattices, used in the construction of a 3-D world to make differences clearer to the creator sitting at the computer, could be printed out and embroidered on silk in minute needlework by specially-trained women. The work even included the menu bar, as if taken from a screenshot. The garden of contemporary delight and threats could, in its reference to Hieronymus Bosch, no longer base its figure solely on the 3-D imago of the artist as soon as it came to the first parents: Adam and Eve, in Bosch's paradise. For Adam's figure Miao Xiaochun employed an anthropomorphic robot with an infinite chain of 0/1 computer digits in his hands and for the figure of Eve the Venus de Milo arising out of a water pool in the foreground, her head bent – uncharacteristically for a Venus – over the abstract symbols of the paper print-out. Miao Xiaochun articulated his associations for this decision in a poetic quatrain "Paradise": "Desireless robot, / Will you be our obedient Adam??? / Armless Venus, / Finds the forbiddance to pick the forbidden fruit needless!!!" He is occupied with the question of whether the Venus de Milo possibly gained her worldwide fame precisely because, without her arms, she was no longer able to feed herself or to tempt others.

“RESTART”, realized between 2008 and 2010 and now exhibited for the first time in Germany in the Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, puts forward a series of decisively new approaches. Aspects of the clash of civilizations, the entanglement of our technologies in the forms of our desire, the role of cultural – and intercultural – memory in commerce with our contemporary situation intersect in a medial attentiveness that lays before us the ambivalence, the seduction, and the disquiet in the experience of the virtual 3-D space and the – transbiomorphic – animation in a completely new manner. Let's be clear from the start: “RESTART” is frightfully beautiful, unsettling, and enticing all at once, and it thereby hits a nerve with our contemporary desires and fears without having to become involved in the subconscious innocence-deal of a crisis that has apparently affected us as unexpectedly as only a sudden extraterrestrial comet impact could.

Thematically, “RESTART” begins with Pieter Bruegel's "The Triumph of Death", that macabre painting from the Prado that teems with figures and swarms conveying death as individual skeletons, groups of skeletons, or entire hordes being delivered from life unto death. The scenario used in the animation of the 3-D reconstruction is rounded out by further pictures from Bruegel: the "Fall of Rebel Angels" and "Mad Meg", heading off to hell, as well as the "Seven Deadly Sins", which have survived only as engravings. The use of Raphael's frescoes "Parnassus" and "The School of Athens" are clearly recognizable, while those less so are the allusions to paintings from Botticelli, Signorelli, El Greco, as well as key images from the 19th century such as Goya's "The Third of May 1808" and finally – with reproductive, plastic clarity – Courbet's "A Burial at Ornans" and Géricault's "The Raft of the Medusa". Several landscapes from Caspar David Friedrich are also made reference to. The canon of European classical art history is supplemented by the icons of progress of China's cutting-edge technological and urban modernization. In toto, it is a mighty undertaking and it is amazing how effortlessly the most varied objects of artistic, architectural, and design reference are combined in the almost 14-minute 3-D animation.

Above all, Miao Xiaochun has ceased replacing the repertoire of human figures in his 3-D transformations with just one personal example. Now he is present three times over: once as the emotionally neutral replica familiar from the other 3-D animations, but then also as an artistic subject recognizable in his own skin and in 'work clothes', that is as a cameraman and simultaneously as a sound assistant with microphone, and finally as an animalistic, autonomously mobile shadow freed from its body – 2-D in the 3-D space! (something normally reserved for accompanying shadows that are necessarily projected on the floor as a result of the incidence of light). One might also include the mini-imagoes of two small children climbing a Jacob's ladder. Moreover, women are now also present. The "Mad Meg" is the figure of a mythological being with a female body and the horned head of a ram, accompanied by other, sexually lascivious ladies with various animal or insect heads. Then, in Raphael's "Parnassus", the repertoire of female figures is retained, transformed into a single, anonymous female 3-D figure, while in a series of other sequences the images of a further, less classically-influenced female 3-D figure are more frequent. Finally, not to be forgotten are the many skeletons that seem to have been let loose not only from Bruegel’s "Triumph of Death" then to appear elsewhere in contemporary modernity. With exaggeratedly long legs, reminiscent of Dali's "The Temptation of St. Anthony", the spindly legs of a skeleton appear to carry the steps of the 'human' avatar of Miao Xiaochun like a ghost and magically guide him along.

So too the repertoire of the figures' forms of movement has changed decisively. What moves 'by itself', what is moved, driven through the 3-D space, what is under the power of some strange remote control, and what, in contrast, doesn't move at all? "Animation" literally means, "to imbue with a soul" – all the more enlightening to know how one interacts with this medium.

What is first apparent is that the groups of people dug up by the shadows from "Triumph of Death" are frozen, as would only befit the dead. It is only the 3-D camera that moves the once-living actors – who had fought against Death himself – through space. In addition, the spears of Death's agents, the skeletons, fly through the virtual air, while the animated fires of hell further underline the motionlessness of the immobile figures. The motionless figures of "The New School of Athens" and the figures of “Parnassus” must also get along without reanimation, with the exception of the violin-playing Apollo at the center of the latter image.

Now, in paintings everything animalistic, whether human, animal, or plant, is eo ipso motionless yet. Life is breathed into these things via the compositional and optical means of the artist so that the lack of 'real' movement is, as a rule, not missed. The first phase in transposing a painted image into 3-D space consists of a reproduction of the world of the painting in a static version, before the programming of animation can begin. Miao Xiaochun does not appear to have skimped on this further step out of efficiency concerns. Much more it appears that the artist has taken up the tradition of the "tableau vivant" in all these sequences. This art form was popular in the second half of the 19th century and is currently experiencing a renaissance. The term is in fact paradoxical: "vivant", alive, are the people who constitute the tableau or picture, while for the moment of the "tableau" they fall into a deathly stillness. The "tableau vivant" was, on the one hand, a reaction to photography whose early long exposure times required a "Don't move!" and to the stiffness of the photographic instant image that still had a disconcerting effect. On the other hand, the "tableau vivant" appears to have been a game driven by irony, in which internalized fears of the stiffness of bourgeois society, with its pure consumerism and life-threatening conventions, were fended off – something that, with an eye to our contemporary problems, might not seem strange at all.

The groups of figures in Miao Xiaochun's "The Garden of Earthly Desires" in "Microcosm" were also largely motionless. In that work, however, there were often several animated arms or legs, depending on the requirements of the scene. Moreover, the camera movements with close-up shots and fast montage reduced the impression of stillness. In RESTART, in contrast, every lack of animation in the mentioned instances seems to have been done with full intention. Thus a new shock emanates from the groups of figures. The dead dug from their graves appear to find no redemption. The figures of "Parnassus" – all decorated with colorful facial masks, with the exception of Apollo – give the impression of a classical artistic ideal, the home of the muses that has in the meantime been appropriated by fashion and window dressing. "The School of Athens", with its classical white, comes across as the paralysis of an artistic educational ideal in the academy rooms of a conservative art school, and this paralysis is further underlined by the gradual decay not only of the figures, but also of the entire architectonic atmosphere. In contrast, when toward the end of the 3-D animation the view moves to the open sea and the icy desert, it is suddenly the groups of figures that are frozen, such as those in Courbet's "A Burial at Ornans", with their feet stuck in the same ice of which they themselves are made. Or perhaps, in Miao Xiaochun’s estrangement of Géricault's "The Raft of the Medusa", a painting of a shipwreck, which highly symbolically evolves the shipwreck of humankind, the raft and the castaways are covered in icicles even if the surface they are mapped onto reminds one more of a polished polyester or some other less expensive imitation. Or maybe there is an underlying ironic game with the optimism of the ensemble of figures from the not only artistically failed socialist realism that springs to mind. Whichever, these evocations from art history seem to pose the question of more than the effect and commerce with the Mnemosyne of artistic memory. It is as if something is also being clung to when the passage into life in the 3-D space occurs: a transition into an artificial world that is insecure about the status of its addition of animated life. Simulation is not life itself, even when recorded.

The exact opposite of the paralysis appears not as the simulated organic, but the morphed movement. This is apparent right from the beginning when the skeleton's legs, which initially carry Miao Xiaochun's image across the landscape, now jump ahead of him in Caspar David Friedrich's "Chalk Cliffs on Rügen", him trailing behind, while the three figures of this famous painting wind around their own axis morphed in slow motion. Morphing is utilized further in the animation primarily with women, such as with the figure of "Mad Meg" and suggestively with her demonic associates. One bewildering climax that borders on disgust is reached by the morphing of an enormous group of women that appears to be standing on a magical, watery island in the night's ocean, poetically fascinating through its abundance of animated reflected lights and shadows, in which they have plunged. What is shockingly disgusting is that – in contrast to the rest – the morphing appears to come not from outside, but seems to follow from an internal, oblivious dance reflex. The body separates at its joints, the bones coming apart, bones which in the biological world normally form the scaffold of the demarcation of wanton abandon, one could say: to enshrine a memory of mortality. Normally morphing is taboo among artists. Miao Xiaochun uses it here in a clear-sighted and metaphorical way, leaving open the question to what extent it is thanks to a submissiveness to the culture industry's spectrum of models. In another sequence the morphing of the figures is impressed from outside with a specific meaning. Thus an association with the double helix is admitted via the coils of the morphing of the floating figure in the brand-new rapid transit train as well as via the clusters of female figures in front of the mirrored surfaces of a row of state-of-the-art aircraft. The association is all the more intriguing given the decisive role the double helix is known to have made for the reproductive decoding of the human genome.

'Natural' movements are simulated by the two children on the Jacob's ladder in the High Gothic church made of Meissen or Chinese porcelain as they are by Miao's 3-D imago on the skating rink. Just as familiar are the pauses in the animalistic movement in moments of heightened concentration, such as when the real picture of the artists appears. These scenes give us the calming feeling of a grounding that is still subject to the forces of gravity.

Gravity can be simulated in any animation, not only in 3-D, but just as well in static images in the relationships of the forms to one another. Miao Xiaochun is very subtle in his use of these possibilities in 3-D simulation, especially in the ways in which he suspends them. It is not only individual bodies, groups of figures, falling leaves, passing birds, or penguins gliding along in a belly landing that are animated. So too the earth cracking open under the spade's blows of the shadow in Bruegel's "Triumph of Death", the gradual disintegration of "The School of Athens", first affecting the figures fall to a 'new antiquity' and then the entire building, and finally the disintegration of the Gothic church in an unbelievably fascinating spatial entanglement of the vaulted ceilings. Finally, the movements of the figures, mythical creatures, and plants propelled through space in Bruegel's "Fall of Rebel Angels" are also animated. Here, however, everything occurs intentionally in the mode of a somewhat slowed-down animation. By suspending the relationship to gravity in this way something hypnotically alluring arises in our perception, something that in the rest of the work stands in stark contrast to the mode of animalistic movement of a group of ephemeral figures in the clouds, filmed in a sequence by the camera man Miao Xiaochun from an airplane. Although living in a realm normally reserved, in fantasy and art, for angels, the inhabitants of the clouds seem to better understand earthly gravity precisely there where – in an icongraphic reference to Goya's “The Third of May 1808” – they fall.

With regard to both the specific dynamic as well as the emotional reception of the animation one cannot pass over the supporting role of the music: the preludio – "sostenuto, ma non troppo" – and the benedictus – "Andante molto cantabile e non troppo mosso" – from Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis", op. 123. This music was not simply chosen in order to "accentuate" the animation. The sequencing of the animated episodes had to follow the music, which presents an endlessly complex task especially in a 3-D animation. This doesn't mean that the animated sequences have to follow the dynamic of the music one-to-one, for that would give a fatally illustrated parallelism. Music and animation must, however, be brought into a phrasal synchronicity. What this means is that when the music is already given, the animation must orient its dramaturgy to the music, and in this Miao Xiaochun has been spectacularly successful.

The preludio, with its slow musical movement, colors the opening scenes to the tracking shot of the artist onto Bruegel's landscape of death. Then the andante of the "benedictus" sets in, in a wafting 3/4 time, evoking a weightless floating. Peculiar to Beethoven's version of the "benedictus" – this is unusual musically – is the almost unbroken cantilena of the first violin, soaring as a solo instrument above the choir and orchestra. But one can be sure of a certain metaphorical counterpoint: the music ties into our desires for an enchanted world, for redemption from earthly constraints and conflicts, just as they are hoped for in the "benedictus" by the one, "qui venit", who comes, namely Christ. However, one needn't be a follower of the Christian promise of redemption to take part in the yearning of the music. And yet, the music often stands in sharp contrast to the disquiet of the animated sequence, giving it its own unique contrapunctal coloration.

The timing of Miao Xiaochun's animation is extraordinary, for instance when a long drawn-out note of the violin is synchronized for a moment with Apollo's violin playing, when the ascension of the small child into the heights of the Gothic cathedral align with the towering flight of the soprano, when the entrance of the choir "in Nomine Domini" with a forte timpani strike paradoxically determines the change to the image of modernity, the orthogonal perspective on the track of a new rapid transit train, or when, in a disorienting mirror animation, the metamorphosis of Miao's 3-D imago in the mirror into a morphed product monstrosity is seconded by a dramatic rise of the soprano. Finally it is enormously impressive when he uses the general pause after the "Hosanna in Excelsis" for the 'visual pause' over the sea, before the camera zooms in and the "Raft of the Medusa" appears in front of the icy, rocky cliffs in the background while the music takes up the "benedictus" anew, before – with a new "Hosanna" ¬¬– the music fades away and the castaways have perhaps found an ambiguous Atlantis exile in the grotto of the island.

Occasionally there is also a discrete, amusing meeting of music and animation. So, when the two figures wedged in margarine blocks as in a scooter in a "high-tech kitchen" melt to the sounds of the "benedictus qui venit", “Blessed is He who comes”, one could be reminded of Maurizio Kagel's "Ludwig van" from 1970, a collage of music and film set to the sounds of Beethoven's Ninth showing elephants in a zoo that perform their earthly material transformation animalistically untouched. Similarly one has to smile when, with the sounds of "Hosanna in Excelsis" in the air, penguins perform a slalom on their bellies through the figures – frozen solid – in Courbet's "Burial at Ornans".

Of course Miao Xiaochun has molded the soundscapes of all his 3-D animations with great care. In "The Last Judgment in Cyberspace" he precisely aligned the sequence of the animation with the text sequence "Where do I go". Moreover he created a mirror axis in the middle that transitioned to a scene – now going from the question to the statement – in which a figure throws her mirrored reflection into the depths – "You should go there". In "H20" he didn't once give in to the temptation to enliven the water in the animation with the sound of drops. Finally, the cosmic space, in spite of all fantasies of the music of the spheres, is unsuitable for the transmission of sound waves – because it lacks any medium through which to travel – and is therefore silent. "Microcosm", finally, also relates the dramaturgy of the animation to the music, in this case to Wagner's long prelude to "Tannhäuser". The soundtrack was supplemented with foley sounds and in one place with a frenetic applause from off-camera. But above all the music received a constant 'accompaniment', that is the impressive 'banging of the keys' on a computer keyboard that 'survived' even the end of the animation - the Tannhäuser prelude - in order for its keyboard commands to direct the journey of the tripartite, contemporary rocket Noah's ark – sheltering people, animals, and plants – off into space.

So what, then, does the first half of the title of my essay "double interface" intend? I would like to elucidate this with reference to the symbolic and technical aspect of the interface.

The English word "interface" is translated into German as "Schnittstelle", in Chinese as "jie mian 界面", “bounding surface”. "Schnittstelle" emphasizes, on the one hand, the technical side while, on the other hand, it has also established a much broader, metaphorical use of the term. The English "interface", from the Latin "facies", face, and "inter", between, literally means "the face in between" and therefore is more suitable for the user interface that shows or gives something to the human subject, something that the computer 'doesn't see'. On the flip side, what the computer user doesn't see is that the robot computer is permanently processing electronic impulses – 0/1, no impulse/impulse – that then appear to us as stabile pictures or texts. If you will, a communicative marvel between man and machine, whose permanent flow depends on the electronic 'water', a 'water' that could dry up plunging us into a spiritual and practical dilemma.

When looking at the symbolic dimension of images, of artistic artifacts all together, one can speak of artworks in general as "interfaces", intermediary creations that initiate communication between the artist and the recipient. Marcel Duchamp described the work of art in his essay "The Creative Act" as an artifact that makes possible an "aesthetic osmosis" between the artist and the public, thus also involving the observer in the process of artistic revelation, if from the other side. It is first through this half of the work, done by the observer, that artwork becomes a social and cultural object. In another place Duchamp therefore remarked: "The work of art is an intermediary." And one can say that at least with every artistic innovation in history the observers stand before a wealth of their own emotional and intellectual work that is sometimes surmounted entirely spontaneously. So, for instance, one could maintain that the observers don't miss the rear sides of the figures in Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" because their imagination adds it in, based on their suggestive, plastic forms. It is Miao Xiaochun, when he transforms the "Last Judgment" into 3-D cyberspace, who must first complete these rear sides and much more as well.

Cyberspace as an artistic laboratory of 3-D animation doubles the situation of the interface. On the one hand, it revolutionizes all the parameters of the illusion of movement – similar to the moving picture in films, video, but also in comparison with 2-D animation or a puppet film – and requires the observer to practice completely new ways of seeing in order to communicate with the symbolic space of the artwork. On the other hand, the artist doesn't communicate with the observers solely through the artwork, but also through the interface of programming, or more simply, the user interface with a "desireless robot" that he hopes to be "our obedient Adam", to use the words of Miao Xiaochun's poem. Neither of the interface functions – the symbolic and technical – is independent of the other. The hyper-real illusions of movement that virtual space makes possible confront both the artist and the observer with an transcendence of the laws of the physical world, which can lead to hypnotic, hallucinatory dream and nightmare worlds, like those we know from our dreams, only that in the virtual world they are much more suggestive, they are 'within our grasp'.

Thus the infinite subtlety with which Miao Xiaochun manipulates his virtual, visual medium is all the more astounding. The three-dimensional cyberspace that appears so solid is electronically processed, both weightless and without substance. This is something that the artist adds in passing when the clerestory and the vaults of the Gothic cathedral suddenly begin to float, unmoored from their architectonic stabilization through the lower sections of the nave, before the vault falls in on itself. The camera of the virtual space, different from a normal camera, can pass effortlessly through this immaterial 3-D space, something that Miao Xiaochun uses very rarely, for example, when the 3-D camera passes through the 3-D model head with an Olympia bird’s nest into its imagination, until the zoom places the runner, without ice skates, on the ice of the interior of the nest. More frequently a means of optical penetration from our empirical space is shown, namely with reflections such as in the contamination of the female double helix garland that breaks in the reflection of the hypermodern airplane, then multiplies and loses. The virtual camera can, however, fly much more freely through its virtual space than any material film or video camera can through physical space, even when a camera crane is available. So we fly together as observers, experience, from the perspective of the virtual camera, a release from gravity that receives an even more emphatic counterpart when the movement of the camera – otherwise very musical and flowing – flies around the torpid figures from Bruegel's "Triumph of Death". The processor speeds of state-of-the-art computers has made it possible for cult films of the defensive nightmare to accelerate from zero to infinity in order to charge dramatic action scenes. Miao Xiaochun uses this maximum speed one single time, namely in his commentary on the speed of technological development in contemporary China, when our eye is carried, so to speak, at the speed of light into the present and into the interior of an empty modern rapid transit train, where we see but a single floating figure of a Möbius strip, while on several benches sleeping skeletons lift their tired heads.

Still, this does not grasp the core problem presented by the 3-D simulation interface. The constructed space of movement diminishes the border between our space here and 'its' space there. The animation can give the impression that the center of movement is not taken to it from outside, but that it lies on the side of the space itself. This is also attributable to the effortless transgression of borders that is possible in the animated 3-D space. In this respect this space promises us a completely new sense of immersion than those possible with conventional camera perspectives. We are drawn into the possibility of potentially boundless metamorphosis. It is like a change of subjects in which self-control is given up and transformed into a controlled becoming. The computer still generates every changing view for us as a surface, but we have nevertheless the feeling that it takes us up into its world. One could say that it possesses an eye capable of three-dimensional perception, an eye that captures all objects from all perspectives at once. Even when we only see them in a succession, the 3-D suggestion remains. The 3-D lattice structures, used initially in the creation of the virtual 3-D space, only strengthen this idea. They are always latent in the programming when the control of spatial movement is concerned and form, so to speak, the skeletal frame of the animation, just as our physical skeleton defines our possible range of movements, together with our tendons and muscles. The skeletal frame of the animation is, however, virtual and therefore not bound to animalistic conditions. In this respect it is something that can be compared to the three-dimensional perspective on a four-dimensional being from Marcel Duchamp's speculations about the fourth dimension, a being whose eye can encompass the limited physical 3-D objects in a single moment.

Like many contemporary artists, Miao Xiaochun is also a historian, not in a scientific sense, but in an artistic one. Therefore, when he incorporates the artistic interfaces of the tradition, he expands the frame of his interrogation of our technological and socio-cultural situation with his contribution of the artistic tradition to our cultural memory. That he includes, with extreme care, the ambivalent possibilities of 3-D animation into his construction of “RESTART” could be taken as a new configuration of the unsolved question regarding the balance between Eros and Thanatos, a question that we cannot cede to the progress of ever newer forms of vicarious satisfaction by taking up ever more refined products and simultaneously a question that we as witnesses are involved in. "Where do we go?" was the question posed in a myriad of ways by his 3-D imago in "The Last Judgment in Cyberspace". If we wish to solve the conflict between Eros and Thanatos with the aid of a division, then perhaps the answer reads: "There is no There there". Plunging into the "There" of artistic cyberspace might provide us with the courage to find new, productive relations between the symbolic world and that of our earthly situation.

--- Beate Reifenscheid, Miao Xiaochun-Macromania, Ludwig Museum,Timezone 8, Hong Kong, 2010