DSL Collection

Miao Xiaochun, The Vertical View, C-print, 6 panels: 244 cm x 720 cm (244 cm x 120 cm each), 2006

?Uncountable numbers of nude bold headed figures dash into the centre rear region of the images surface. In fact, they must be flying as they move among clouds. A close look reveals to the viewer that the figures all show identical bodily and facial features.

Such physical likeness is not testimony to a lack of imagination or skill of the artist but his very intention. Miao first earned himself a name in international art circles with a series of photographs all showing a fibreglass figure of a Confucian gentleman in a sort of general Han- (206 B.C. -220 A.D.) to Song-dynasty (960-1279 A.D.) dress. The life size model, which clearly has the artist?s face, is depicted in various situations of contemporary urban life. Miao developed his plastic alter ego as a reaction to the feeling of alienation in a different culture when studying in Germany from 1995-1999. This intercultural unease expanded into an intra-cultural one when Miao returned to China and suddenly realized that he now had an outsider?s look on his former inside. From these early autobiographic works, Miao went on to a more intensive exploration of the artistic potential of the medium photography. Since 2002 he created large size photographs, which at first sight just look like ordinary photographic images but in fact are highly artificial montages of many single shots. Like in a traditional landscape painting the same people might appear in different spots in the scene or the relation between foreground, centre and background are not in accordance with western laws of perspective.

Driving his photographic experiments one step further The Vertical View is part of one of the last large series in the work of Miao Xiaochun. It was inspired by and is an extension of Michelangelo?s The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Miao digitally cloned himself through the creation of a 3 D model of his body, which he then programmed into many different positions and copied into various panels. Only two of these panels are directly based on Michelangelo?s original. The rest are mathematical extrapolations of the fresco?s picture space. It required the help of three assistants and took the artist three months to complete the work. The Last Judgement in Cyberspace series provokes a drastic alteration in the viewer?s direction of gaze as it nearly physically pulls him/her into the image as well as it is a at once free and respectful approach to an iconic work of occidental art history. With his works of the last decade, Miao has created an art that is as subtly as it is genuinely globalized. ?
Christof Buettner

" Miao Xiaochun has generated a 3-D model of his body and substituted his image for each of the 400 figures in Michelangelo's painting. Using software to manipulate the model into different positions, he then integrated these 3-D figures into a virtual space based on Michelangelo's composition. He could then travel within the painting like a tourist, taking photos as he went along, from within the pictorial frame as well as from without. The artist worked with three assistants for six months to create these works.

Wu Hung writes, "What do the figures in Michelangelo's Last Judgement - not only Christ and the Virgin but also the angels, the saints, the Damned, and the Blessed - see at this fatal moment? -- What do they behold within the vast, mythical space in the fresco amidst a cosmic movement that is simultaneously orderly and chaotic? To Miao Xiaochun, to answer these questions means to enter the painting and to assume the varied gazes of the painted figures."

Miao Xiaochun's use of technology provokes new ways of seeing. Viewing the icon from inside and outside the picture frame raises such fundamental questions as "What lies beyond and after the Last Judgment?" and "How is the importance of main characters affected when rotating the pictorial space makes their positions peripheral?" Director Julie Walsh remarks: "the sheer scale of Miao Xiaochun's reinterpretation is mind-boggling. The physical reality of these photos is monumental. Miao Xiaochun has pioneered a new way of body-surfing through cyberspace in search of meaning."


Mr. Miao's photographs have been seen in museums and biennials around the world including solo shows at the Beijing Art Museum and Shanghai Art Museum, the Mus?N?e CRAC (France), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Taiwan), and the Ludwig Museum (Germany). His photography is featured in the "Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China" show that started at the International Center for Photography and Asia Society (New York), and traveled to Chicago, London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and other cities. He was also featured in the 2005 "Mahjong" exhibition of the Uli Sigg collection (Kunstmuseum, Bern)."

Wu Hung is Professor and Director, Center for the Art of East Asia, at the University of Chicago. He is chief curator of the Gwangju Bienniale 2006 and curator of "Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China." He is a frequent curator of Walsh Gallery shows.