PHANTASMAGORIA

Recent Photographs by Miao Xiaochun

By Wu Hung

The centerpiece of this exhibition is an eight-meter-long photograph showing a panorama of Wuxi (Mirage). One of Miao Xiaochun’s latest works, it was taken at the top of Huishan -- a famous hill in this ancient city in southeast China. A viewer of the picture can still spot some traditional buildings here and there. But his view is dominated by a sea of skeleton-like high rises, most of which have only emerged in the past few years. It is this abrupt transformation of the city that has inspired Miao Xiaochun to title the photograph Haishi shenlou, literally “a city in the ocean with pavilions made of seashells.” As he explains in the interview attached to this short introduction:

“it seems that all those modern buildings you see from the hilltop shouldn’t be there, but they’ve suddenly emerged before your eyes, like a mirage in the ocean or desert. I use the phrase haishi shenlou to indicate the seemingly surreal feeling of such modern architecture in the East.”

To Miao, a native of Wuxi who spent his childhood in the neighborhoods at the foot of Huishan, such a “surreal feeling” is acute and personal. Again as he says in the interview, he painted Wuxi from the same hilltop even when he was in elementary school, and many places around Huishan are fused with his memories of the city. Indeed, a considerable number of photographs in this exhibition focus on these places, including the municipal zoo (Fly), a statue of Confucius (Another Time), and a huge smokestack left from the Maoist era (Towering). These places became landmarks and acquired their identities at different historical moments. As they coexist with one another and also with the newly emerging high rises in Haishi shenlou, the photograph represents a city that is profoundly heterogeneous -- a spectacle comprised of fragmentary elements and characterized by constant historical discontinuity. Fantastic yet disturbing, this cityscape has inspired me to call this exhibition Phantasmagoria, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines in three interrelated senses: 1) a fantastic sequence of haphazardly associative imagery, as seen in dreams or fever; 2) a constantly changing scene composed of numerous elements; and 3) fantastic imagery as represented in art. All these meanings are pertinent to Miao Xiaochun’s recent photographs in this exhibition.

§

Since the late 1990s, Miao Xiaochun has created a large body of works that can be divided into four groups or periods. The initial group, shown in his first photography exhibition at Gallery Stellwerk in Kassel, consists of his graduation works in Kunsthochschule Kassel. This is a series of black-and-white photographs, each with a life-size mannequin as its central character. Dressed as an ancient Chinese gentleman, the figure has Miao Xiaochun’s face and is clearly created as the artist’s alter-ego. Several photographs represent him as a mysterious traveler to the West from an unidentified time/place in China’s past: he is arriving in a desolate subway station (Arrival) or watching other travelers in a crowded airport. The figure then appears in various social contexts in his new foreign home -- at the dinner table with an ordinary family (As a Guest of a German Family) or in a factory shop, a classroom, or a political gathering. On all these occasions he remains dignified but distant. Rigid and with an unchanging expression, his enduring silence amounts to an inability to communicate. Thus when he does act he takes the role of a detached watcher of other people (On Herkules). These photographs are clearly autobiographical in nature, as they embody Miao Xiaochun’s personal experience while he was a foreign student in Germany.

But they are not self-indulgent because the images problemtize his self-identity. As he states in the interview, he substituted the mannequin for himself because the statue could better symbolize Chinese culture at its prime moment in the past. But such voluntary substitution is not without cost: the artist as an individual has to disappear from these autobiographic representations; and the statue, while remaining lofty and self-possessed, can never become part of real life.

This dilemma continues and deepens in the second group of photographs, which Miao Xiaochun created after he returned to China in 1999 and exhibited in a one-man show in the Gallery of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2001. The exhibition’s title, From East to West and Back Again, defines it as a sequel to the previous exhibition. This significance is again established by the statue, which appears in each photograph as well as in a sculptural form in an installation. Situated in the Chinese environment, however, the meaning of the ancient gentleman is further complicated. On the one hand, he is resurrected from the past and is a stranger to modern life. On the other hand, he has retuned to China by way of a foreign country. The contrast between this figure and his surroundings thus reflects the conflict between China’s tradition and modernization, and also signifies Miao Xiaochun’s “culture shock” upon he returning to his country after five years, during which time China underwent rapid globalization and commercialization. Some photographs in this group show the statue in a western-style fashion shop, a fast food restaurant, a barren new housing development, or among omnipresent commercial advertisements (Propaganda and Advertise). Miao Xiaochun explains these images in the interview:

“Actually, the relationship between this figure and contemporary China seems even more “disharmonious”than in my German pictures -- its appearance in a Chinese city seems even more abrupt and illogical. I think this is because China’s changes in recent years have been extremely abrupt and sudden.”

This also explains some other photographs in this group, which are characterized by a nostalgic longing. In one of these images, the ancient figure looks at the “monkey rink”(houshan) in the Wuxi zoo, a place that Miao Xiaochun knew well from childhood. Another picture was taken from the top of Huishan, where Miao painted Wuxi when he was a boy. Several other photographs represent the statue on the Great Wall. While this last series seems to reinstall the figure in his original cultural environment, one photograph represents him as having fainted on the Wall (No Hostility, No Resistance). One woman has stopped to rescue him, while some western tourists walk by him with puzzled expressions on their faces.

Starting from 2002, Miao Xiaochun began to create large, colorful photographs with the help of digital technology. Whereas these works constantly evoke earlier themes and images -- the deepening commercialization of Chinese society, the solitude of the ancient gentleman, and the contrast between traditional and contemporary culture, their increasingly complex compositions reflect the artist’s heightened attraction to stylistic and technical innovations. His tendency to frame a picture in an overly long composition was already evident in the previous period, but now Miao Xiaochun began self-consciously to connect this compositional style with ancient Chinese painting. He frequently talks about this connection in the interview. Generally, he considers that a traditional Chinese painting, either a horizontal handscroll or a vertical hanging scroll, differs fundamentally from a western painting in its inherent temporality. Unlike a western painting (or photograph) composed according to the linear perspective system, a scroll painting often has multiple scenes and corresponding vanishing points. The multiple appearance of a figure further guides the viewer to read the painting as a narrative. Digital technology allows him to realize in photography this artistic vision derived from traditional painting, as he can weave numerous images into a single composition, creating subtle tensions and transitions unattainable with a conventional camera.

Take his 2002 Transmission, for example. Its horizontal composition roughly consists of three sections. To the left, a quiet river flows by a cluster of traditional-style houses; Miao Xiaochun’s ancient gentleman stands inward, contemplating the dark water. The middle section is dominated by a stone runway leading up to a bridge; its exaggerated foreshortening is further enhanced by the much reduced sizes of two passengers. A narrow lane appears next to the runway and cuts deeply into the picture plane; two boys are running toward us with toy guns in their hands. To the right of this lane is the third section of the picture, showing a row house at a sharp angle. We are suddenly pushed to the white wall of the houses, in front of which a young girl is dialing a cell phone. Fusing reality and fiction in a constructed pictorial space, the photograph is deliberately incoherent and even absurd. But the artist has so skillfully maneuvered the transitions between the sections and images, that the picture’s absurdity becomes evidence for his rationality and technical sophistication.

§

Exemplified by Transmission, most pictures in this exhibition belong to the third group of Miao Xiaochun’s work. This period is terminated by Haishi shenlou, the photograph with which I began this introduction. Significantly, in this picture the sculpted gentleman makes his last appearance, while Miao Xiaochun’s own image appears for the first time. Sitting in two separate cables cars, they pass each other going in opposite directions. It is as if the artist is saying goodbye to the statue, who will no longer serve as his alter-ego.

From this moment on Miao Xiaochun enters his fourth and current phase, represented by two backlit transparencies in this exhibition. Both works are intertextual in intent and take temporality as the main subject of representation. Stumble evokes Marcel Duchamp’s Women on the Staircase and represents a young girl falling as she walks up the stairs. Celebration records the inauguration ceremony of a large housing complex in Beijing. While its grand composition and precise imagery recalls Andreas Gursky’s work, Miao Xiaochun’s major inspiration again comes from the inherent temporality he finds in traditional painting.

“Instead of showing the statue, it represents real people reappearing multiple times here and there -- the idea is that these people were moving around during the event. It’s usually considered a taboo to repeat the same figure in a photograph. How can a person appear twice or three times in the same picture? But this is exactly what I hope to represent. For example, there is a journalist who photographed the inauguration from different spots; and an organizer of the ceremony was at one time on the stage and at other times below the stage. When I combined these moments in the photograph, it’s as though this organizer is watching himself directing the program on the stage. This photograph thus conveys a different sense of reality because it represents the whole process of the event. I no longer need the ancient figure because the connection between the photograph and traditional culture is now found in the style of the photograph. In an ancient painting, such as those depicting Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossom Spring or his home-coming, a figure often appears multiple times in representing a sequence of events. This is a particular pictorial language or style, which I have absorbed into my photographs.”

We can conclude this introduction with these words because they state the goal of Miao Xiaochun’s current artistic experiment.

--- Wu Hung, Phantasmagoria: Recent Photographs by Miao Xiaochun, Walsh Gallery, Chicago, 2004