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Global video art on rise and fall of utopian ideas
Print Edition
Video and digital artist Miao Xiaochun transforms Peter Breughel’s apocalyptic “Triumph of Death” (1592) into a 3D animation of world masterpieces featuring crumbling and rising civilizations.
He includes China’s recent staggering economic growth and technical prowess, but there’s nothing triumphal about it. This too crumbles in a continuing cycle.
Miao’s 15-minute work “Restart” is part of a major video exhibition titled “The Best of Times, the Worst of Times Revisited” at M50.
It also features recent video works by Lutz Becker, Gulsun Karamustafa, Map Office, Tracey Moffat, John Rock and Yang Fudong.
The exhibition is curated by David Elliott, the founding director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the first director of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. He is on the Asia Advisory Board of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
The exhibition features works from the 1st Kieve Biennale in 2012 curated by Eliott.
The title echoes the opening of Dicken’s “A Tale of Two Cities” (1859) set during the French Revolution. According to Eliott, the exhibition “considers how contemporary art and aesthetics have used the past to express the future by reflecting on utopian dreams of freedom, equality, and security as well as on their opposite: terror, inequity and war. It is the destructive forces of both man and nature that seem to make a more ideal life impossible. ”
Visitors use hab earphone so the sounds of videos are not mixed.
Miao, 50, is one of China’s most influential new media artists. He graduated from the National Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and the Kunsthochschule Kassel in Germany.
His work “Restart” demonstrates his familiarity masterpieces from the canon of Western art that shift and morph into each other, crumbling and rising into new images from the East, such as those of modern China.
Date: Through March 2, 11am-6pm, closed on Mondays
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