Arario Gallery Seoul is hosting the Maio Xiaochun_New Works Exhibition from April 10th to May 16th 2009, the premiere of the new works by one of the most representative artists of China’s new media art, Maio Xiaochun.

Miao Xiaochun, having graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing China and studied at Kunsthochschule in Kassel, Germany, received his Bachelor degree in German literature and Masters in Art History before launching his study in fine art, which is why we see glimpses of his mastery in the Humanities discipline mingled with his art works. Especially, his recent works, which reinterpret classic masterpieces from a contemporary perspective using cutting-edge digital technology, embody fragments of our contemporary world through his subjective interpretation within the image system of the masterpieces, while engaging the audience by harmonizing elements we generally view as polar opposites, such as past historical and modern images, actual and virtual realities, or the East and West.

The new Miao Xiaochun’s Exhibition, titled “New Works,” coming to Seoul with all new works since the Microcosm series currently being showcased at Arario Gallery, New York from since March 4th, consists of 14 pieces, including video work, digital painting and digital etching. The new works are reinterpretations by European Renaissance masters, such as Bruegel’s “Seven Deadly Sins,” “Triumph of Death” and Botticelli’s “Historia de Nastagio degli Onesti,” and Raphael’s “the School of Athens.”

Mao Xiaochun’s version of Bruegel’s “Seven Deadly Sins,” which is a reinterpretation of the seven deadly sins named by the Bible in accordance with the prospective from Bruegel’s own age, is yet again another revision based on the 21st century’s zeitgeist. Whereas Raphael’s original “School of Athens” is a narrative of the greatest minds in ancient Greece, specially focusing on the tension between Plato and Aristotle, the mentor and the pupil, and their difference of the aspects of their philosophies, Mao Xiaochun’s version of the School of Athens shows how philosophy or religious faith that captivate our souls are ephemeral and vulnerable upon the relinquishment, by including trees and grass burgeoning in the school premises, implying their natural cycle of budding, flourishing but demising after all . As Raphael had incorporated his own image into his work, Mao Xiaochun also presents his own avatar in his piece. Like Michelangelo or Raphael during the Renaissance period, Mao Xiaochun, by featuring his own image in his work, uses his double created by means of 21st uttury digital technology. These doubles are not only the protagonists and but also most of the characters represented in Miao Xiaochun’s works. In “School of Athens,” the artist was the intellect of the given age and at once mentor and pupil; in the past works, the artist was the Eve and Adam in Eden, sinner and angel on the last Judgment Day. Mao transforms all the characters in the Western Renaissance artworks, in which clear dichotomies between black and white, or heaven and hell rule the scene, into his own avatars. By doing so, Mao Xiaochun shows how we all are at once sinners and angels, that all these contradictory elements are crucial necessities in our lives, arriving at a philosophy of harmony, the Oriental Yin and Yang.

Although we the spectators are the denizens of the 21st century, clearly marked by our cultural heritage as “easterners,” the Western European artworks Mao Xiaochun presents are by no means unfamiliar. Nor are the eastern philosophies the artist implies in his reinterpretations of Western art. East and West… at some point in the future, such distinctions may all become simply obsolete. As Mao Xiaochun’s avatar encompasses all gender and ethnic demarcations, the place where the I can become the Other and the Other I, the very center of Mao Xiaochun’s art where both death and life may be transcended – wouldn’t this be our “new” Renaissance, where we all may start, afresh?

Miao Xiaochun, currently teaching at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, has exhibited his works in numerous places in Le Grand Palais in France, ZKM Karlsruhe in Germany and Victoria and Albert Museum in the UK. The artist has shown his works in Arario Gallery in Beijing, Arario Gallery in New York, Alexander Ochs Gallery in Berlin, Germany, Osage Gallery in Singapore, and Walsh Gallery in Chicago, U.S.A.