Two Chinese artists whose works are based upon ancient art forms are featured in the February exhibition at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries.
Several six- or eight-foot paintings by Cao Xiaodong contrast Chinese icons, such as Mao Zedong, with 1960s American icons like Marilyn Monroe, or young women in the military uniforms of the Cultural Revolution with Playboy Bunnies of the same era.
One eight-foot-tall painting is of the face of Mao Zedong broken into sixteen segments, each taken from a different time in his life.
Other large-scale works place photos of the Tiananmen Square massacre side-by-side with one of the May 1968 French student uprising, a clunky tractor and its uniformed women operators with leggy British models and their 1930s snazzy two-tone sedan, and American rock star Jimi Hendrix and his guitar with two Chinese girls and a guitar, a uniformed Red Guard hovering ominously behind them.
Smaller paintings depict Ruan Lingyu, megastar of the era of silent Chinese films, whose tragic life and early death is familiar to nearly everyone in her native country, and another Chinese beauty whose semi-reclining pose was featured on a postcard of the 1920s that was so widely popular that it has become another of the nation’s icons.
Along with other visual artists who came of age during the Cultural Revolution, Xiaodong was forced to work in another field–in his case, as a publications designer. In those days the only way to reproduce continuous-tone photographs was by using a dot pattern named after its inventor, Ben Day.
Xiaodong’s paintings use Ben Day dots as well as the old photos to evoke a sense of nostalgia, which he contrasts with a single dotted border and common computer terms: “Save As,” “Delete,” “Control V” and “Esc,” reminders that his paintings are current, in the computer era.
Chinese critics also point out that like the “literati,” gentlemen of leisure who painted the familiar ancient watercolor landscapes with their jagged mountains and feathery trees, Xiaodong limits his colors to the same range of five tonal values.
Like Xiaodong, Li Xiaofeng also recycles an older Chinese art tradition: in his case, pieces of Ming, Qing, Yuan and Song dynasty porcelain that he has gathered from old trash dumps and bulldozed buildings, fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and sewn with silver wire into full-length dresses and a man’s jacket, complete with shirt and necktie.
Button-and-loop closures along one edge allow both the dresses and man’s jacket to be worn-standing upright only, with cautious movements provided they are shaped to the body of the person wearing them. Catalog photos show young women in two of the artist’s porcelain dresses, and the artist himself models the jacket.
One of Xiaofeng’s dresses in this exhibition includes three tiles from the Emperor’s Palace, which can be distinguished by their five-clawed dragons. Dragons of Chinese nobility were restricted to four-claws; ordinary people could have tiles or dishes with three-clawed dragons. For anyone other than the emperor to display a five-clawed dragon was considered treason, punishable by death.
Xiaodong planned to model this porcelain jacket at Art Basel Miami Beach, but the works did not arrive in time. The first words learned by the artist, in Miami on his first trip outside China, were “My heart broken.” He stayed in Miami long enough to see his priceless porcelain garments installed in the Coral Gables gallery, which eased his disappointment somewhat.
The “SAVE AS:” exhibition marks another historic “first” in the 35-year history of ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries. The show is Xiaodong’s first one-person exhibition outside China, and the porcelain dresses and jacket have never before been exhibited outside China.
“The next time most of these works will be displayed probably will be in a museum, either in this country or in Asia,” notes gallery owner Virginia Miller. “This is the final month to see these historic works together.”
Located in the heart of the Coral Gables business district at 169 Madeira Avenue, ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries is Greater Miami’s longest-established contemporary fine art gallery. It is open to the public from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. A virtual tour of the “SAVE AS” exhibition may be seen at www.virginiamiller.com.
For information on the artist and the gallery, please visit www.virginiamiller.com
