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
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