MIAO MIAO

Most of Miao Miao’s paintings emerge from sketches or mobile phone snapshots. Her capturingand observation of the landscape along her travel routes, and the imagination she attaches to it, are thewellspring behind the snowball world she builds. In other words, Miao Miao is engrossed by the act ofgraphically rendering the ephemeral world. Through the medium of painting, Miao Miao takes hercaptured fragments of the everyday and subjects them to montage-style compilation, reconstructing herperceptions of time and space.

Though the pictures Miao Miao constructs always contain thought-provoking and tantalizingnarrative and literary elements, the real keystone of Miao Miao’s painting has always been the explorationof shape and color. For Miao Miao, what matters isn’t just what she paints, but the process of paintingitself. Miao Miao has picked up the various iconified, often swelling forms that permeate everydaylife—heads, posteriors, fruits, footballs, snowballs, and other forms and notions pulled from the everydayand further fostered into being in her mind. The term “snowball” is a conceptual model of Miao Miao’sself-refinement. It also refers to this form, and a simple catch-all term for the process of falling, conden-sation and melting. Like the constantly-shifting appearance of the outer world, it may not last forever, butthis very process of organic transformation between solid and liquid reveals its vitality.

The people who appear in Miao Miao’s pictures are often common people, masses, lackingspecific identity and with unclear faces. She has intentionally simplified and generalized these imagesencountered on her travels, focusing on grasping their postures and movements, drawing the viewer intoa living dynamic, while the trappings of flat graphic style lend them a touch of fantasy.

Her artistic practice is not limited to non-traditional painting styles and medium research, buthas expanded into broader territory. Her tireless exploration of form and color has naturally drawn MiaoMiao to experiment in transformations between two and three dimensions. She uses handmade paperclay as a sculptural material, which she then colors in an attempt to establish a precise, unified channellinking abstract concepts and concrete, tangible material forms.

The brightly colored fruits of disparate shapes in her latest work In the Fruit Store (2023) are adiscussion of issues in world geographics; Funeral (2023) is a reflection on life and time; while _In K’s Bus_(2023) presents an ode to life and a love song to the beautiful moments of the everyday. An apple extractedfrom Near the Castle (2023) has been turned into sculpture Boat (2023), in a deep dive into themes oftemptation and choice, with the symbolic element of the apple engaging thinking on the complex rela-tionships between desire, strategy, and momentous decisions.

Every work in the exhibition is like a snowball that has coalesced from everyday observations andexperiences, vivid and dynamic. It is as if the viewer has been invited to step into a visual kaleidoscopemade from a riotous profusion of colorful fragments of the everyday. Behind the pleasing visuals are theartist’s rigorous painting practice and fierce ambition as she attempts, within the rapid fluctuations of theeveryday, to find diverse images of common people and life, to use fantastical thinking to activate them,and find the vitality within, that core that should be at the heart of the snowball world.