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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 13, 2005)
BY SYLVIE PEDERSON The Greater Reality Intuitive paintings by Miao Hui-Xin V ital energy that emanates from vibrant colors and rhythms first strikes the visitor upon entering the White Lotus gallery, where The Greater Reality: Intuitive Paintings by Miao Hui- Xin (b. 1959) is currently on view through Oct. 22. Miao has worked as a farmer his entire life and still does. He began painting when the Chinese Communist regime was active- ly encouraging peasant art by sending trained artists to teach classes in rural com- munities. So-called Chinese peasant paint- ing, a relatively recent genre, emerged in the late 1950s as a government-promoted, nationwide peasant art movement that led to the creation of rural art communes some- times known as “painting villages” or “peasant artist colonies.” However, Miao’s work has little to do with this mainstream Chinese peasant art. The two superficially share some traits, to be sure: bright colors (although Miao’s wide- ranging palette also includes sober, muted tones); a strong sense of compositional design; narrative elements; frequent use of a Seven Sculptures in front of the Portland Art Museum, gouache by Miao Hui-Xin bird’s eye view; indifference to perspective; and spatial realism (in keeping with Chinese tradition but to a different effect). Nonetheless, fundamental characteristics of Chinese peasant art are entirely absent from Miao’s paintings, especially the ideal- ization of daily life into prettily happy scenes and the absence of individuality. But themes of everyday life in Miao’s works are intimate and personal rather than collective and ideologically sanctioned. A mainstream peasant artist, after coming up with a design, will paint it again and again, thus mass-pro- ducing his or her “originals” for the tourist trade. In contrast, Miao’s work is remark- ably varied and keeps evolving. The American label “outsider art,” though sometimes stretched as a marketing ploy to include all but mainstream art, strict- ly speaking refers to works by marginal indi- viduals, such as the mentally ill, the institu- tionalized, recluses, antisocial characters. It was coined in 1972 as an equivalent for the French term Art Brut (“Raw Art”) and has been applied to Miao’s work, wrongly. Miao, a well-integrated member of his com- munity, was from the start aware of the peas- ant art produced around him. He considers himself an artist and has a successful rela- tionship with the art world at large. Moreover, Miao’s is not an art turned obsessively inward but instead is inspired by and revels in the social world around him — family members, friends, musicians. It is also about emotions such as love and its corollaries (togetherness, tenderness, sad- ness) as well as exuberance and exultation in life (dancing, making music, feeling the wind, tasting corn). Folk art, often functional, draws upon a community’s cultural traditions and indige- nous crafts for its techniques and motifs. It is thus inherently conservative. Miao, in con- trast, has worked out formal solutions of his own. His pictorial representations are highly eccentric. Indeed, if one considers that pur- Family Compound II, gouache by Miao Hui-Xin suit of individualism is not in and of itself part of traditional Chinese culture, Miao does appear to possess a rebellious streak. (He was the first in his village to wear jeans.) Miao’s work is rooted in the artist’s experience of his everyday culture, rather than in that culture’s traditional means of expression. Indeed, along the way, Miao’s painting has evolved into an art that rein- vents the journey of prominent modern European painters. It is astonishing to discover, in this large- ly self-taught artist, echoes of Matisse in the treatment of color and picture plane (Fruits), Picasso (Upon Departure, Seven Sculptures, Love, Red, Family), Chagall (Mother, A Few White Clouds, Cellist), German Expressionism and African art. Miao combines Chinese and Western perspectives and often playfully distorts both. Gravity sometimes appears defied, people and trees airborne. From Family Compound I to II, the complexity of planes has increased from representing a whimsical architecture within the realm of possibility (see Piet Blom’s cube houses in Rotterdam) to depiction of an impossible space in a loosely Escherian sense. Miao breaks up the surfaces of garments and bodies into angular geometric facets of colors. some of them reminiscent of a Harlequin’s costume. He also breaks them into decorative patterns and patchworks or into free-form areas of color. As a result, his work suggests a playful three-dimensionali- ty. In Wind the characters and their back- ground are all broken into bands of different colors, as if people, land and air shared the same essence which the wind refracts into colors like a prism. Mother and Daughter, gouache by Miao Hui-Xin Facial expressions achieve great emo- tional subtlety despite often exaggerated facial features. This highly original work touches us emotionally with the humanity, poetry and sincerity of its content as well as with the freshness and energy of its execution. ew Authentic Carribean Cuisine featuring Rum drinks in the Equator Lounge Live Music Nightly • DJ Kal-El Every Saturday Night EVERYDAY SPECIALS: Jamaican Red Stripe $2 • Mojitos $4 • Cuba Libra $1.50 1280 Willamette St. • Suite 206 • Eugene, OR • 484-BLUE • bluelunaclub.com 26 OCTOBER 13, 2005 New Arrivals from India, Nepal, & Tibet 265 E. 13th Ave. Eugene, OR 97401 • 541.485.8007 • Key to Tibet@yahoo.com
