Arario New York is pleased to present Microcosm, an exhibition of more than twenty works in three dimensional animation, multi-panels, digital paintings, drawings, and embroideries.

As one of the most representative artists of China’s new media art, from early realism photograph to 3-dimensional work, Miao Xiaochun has always focused on the humanities, history and reality from a sociological and art historical perspective. The latest series of works employs the most advanced computer technologies, using classical paintings as a foundation of visual structure to create outlandish modern montages of virtual reality.

In views of subjective definitions toward historical images, Miao Xiaochun’s Microcosm is based on Netherlandish master Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delight. He reinterprets the traditional Chinese idiom ‘Looking up the Sky from the Well’ to ‘Looking down the Well from the Sky’ (the literal translation of ‘Microcosm’). If the idiom ‘looking up the sky from the Well’ is used to describe a person with limited sight and knowledge struggling to comprehend the essence of life, ‘Looking down the Well from the Sky’ offers an image of a person located in a macro environment open to examining with a micro-lens but also struggling an all expansive understanding.

Microcosm is not created to recover the very truth of historical images, rather it is transformed and deducted with implied meaning within the image system, an effort to deconstruct the internal meaning of history and create psychological medium analysis. It recreates modern images in the tangled relations among reality and virtual world, familiarity and strangeness, intimacy and alienation, ego and non-ego.

C-print photographs, drawings, digital ink and wash painting, embroideries and other works expand the technique of expression and the limitation of materials, taking the 3-dimensional effect as a medium and utilizing the character of one medium to recover, translate, imitate, mix another.

Miao Xiaochun was born in China and studied at Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing where he currently teaches. He also attended the Kunsthochschule in Kassel, Germany. The artist has shown his works at Alexander Ochs Gallery in Berlin, Osage Gallery in Singapore and Walsh Gallery in Chicago. His works have also been exhibited at Le Grand Palais in France, Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo in Brazil, Groninger Museum and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in the Netherlands, Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna, ZKM Karlsruhe in Germany, Art Museum Bern and Museum of Art Lucerne in Switzerland, Victoria and Albert Museum in U.K., Smart Museum of Art Chicago and Seattle Art Museum in U.S.A.