In the strange world of Maleonn, laughing superheroes are covered in bruises, while postmen walk through walls to deliver their mail. Using digital resources and manual re-colourisation techniques, this former film director constructs a fanciful and mischievous universe, where a wild imagination sets up a metaphorical narrative framework.
Childhood is at the heart of this kingdom, because Maleonn, whose real name is Ma Liang – a young fictional character who had the power to transform reality at the will of his fantasies – harbours an inner child, one who has never forgiven us for growing up. Born in Shanghai in 1972 and endowed with his peculiar name, Ma Liang was always destined to become an artist. The son of the head of the Shanghai Opera and a famous actress, he was surrounded by an “artificial” theatrical universe. The fictional and romantic lives on stage were early on contrasted with a particularly drab external reality. During the Cultural Revolution, his parents were sent to the countryside and so he stayed alone with his sister for many years. Left alone, the young Maleonn invented a salutary universe, a world of dreams and fantasies.
“Photography is my magic brush.” Each photograph bears a dramatic intensity, often tainted with irony. The Postman was born out of the real-life figure of Ferdinand Cheval, a rural French postman who at the end of the 19th century built himself a Palais Idéal [Ideal Palace] with stones that he had picked up whilst on his rounds. Faced with a dreary and morose daily life, Maleonn the magician brings a touch of unreality, where imagination is an escape, and memory the melancholy of a lost innocence.
A number of recurring objects and symbols occupy this dreamlike universe: scenes from plays, his first childhood memories, masks, colourful marbles, flying papers, as well as untameable animals... While the Unforgivable Children are playing truant and sending their exam papers off into the wind, the letters of the Postman seem to find their way poetically to their mysterious addressees. Ma Liang accompanies each of his series with poems in which Chinese and foreign literary references are common: Journey to the West, A Midsummer Night's Dream, or perhaps the work of contemporary poet, Bei Dao.
Dramatic or comical, the characters in his fables are there to entertain us. Disguised and made-up, they display the grandiloquent body movements of Chinese opera. In The Boys from Shanghai or Amber, young adults in military uniform imitate the great figures of communism. With their identity carefully hidden, the characters frolic and gesticulate, egging each other on or, forlorn, wander around like stricken souls.
As for Little Flagman, this clown-man has all the regalia of a censor, listening and judging as he hides behind his smiling mask. For the heroes of Maleonn's photographs hang on to their idealism despite the depressing sets that surround them, or the grotesque situations that they encounter. Also, when Maleonn evokes contemporary China and his history, he also engages with what he calls the “sentimental” history of traditional China. In the midst of a calm black and white landscape reminiscent of classical calligraphy, the “laminated” and arrow-pierced character in A Chinese History evokes a strategist from the time of the Three Kingdoms. The use of black and white makes the subjects more serious, more distant from childhood, where melancholy seems to have overcome playfulness.
Concerning his photographic references, Maleonn tells us willingly about the work of Czech photographer Jan Saudek, about the theatrical aspect and ambiguous atmosphere that is produced by his nude photographs, caught between humour and darkness. Impassioned by cinema, he cites the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami , similarly trained in advertising. One thinks too of Tim Burton or Jean-Pierre Jeunet for their luxuriant worlds, overflowing imagination associated with childhood, and their alternative use of black and white or colour depending on the subject.
During his career as a director, Maleonn learned how to direct actors and developed his innate sense of stagecraft. A collector of miscellaneous objects, he also thinks up the costumes and props that are necessary for his stage designs. During his studies in graphic design in Shanghai's most prestigious university of Fine Arts, he acquired a perfect command of digital tools. A painter since the age of eleven, certain series such as Portraits of Mephisto are recoloured by hand in post-production. At each stage of the process, the image is constructed with minute detail. He manages, with genius, to fuse numerous artistic media into a single photographic frame in order to bring us ever deeper into the discovery of his kingdom.
For it is an infinite world of rare density that presents itself to the spectator; a world of illusions at once conscious and subconscious. In his symbol-laden photographs, Maliang presents an unedited and constantly renewed visual experience. Testimony to a great command of visual and scenic languages, Maleonn's deceptively naïve photographs captivate and question our perception of reality, enlightening the labyrinth of our spirits and the complexity of our existence.
