The Neo-Cubism Out of Nothing
A Video of this Work
Miao Xiaochun, 3D Animation Installation, 14 minutes, 2011-12
Formal Analysis
Neo-Cubism Out of Nothing is Miao Xiaochun’s installation, and this was one of artworks shown in the Chinese pavilion [1] at the 55th international art exhibition in Venice, 2013. The theme of the pavilion was about exploration of ‘transfiguration’, with particular focus on bridging the gap between life and art, the transformation of life to art, of the commonplace to artworks or art performance, of non-art to art. Seven Chinese artists explored this notion of change through different mediums and subjects, extending from heavenly perspectives.[1]
Neo-Cubism Out of Nothing was, with this kind of aspect, installed as a form of a hexahedral box and showed several videos but in order by five projectors from five different angles except for the bottom side, having a grand, epic atmosphere and classical music. In the 3D animation videos, there are sceneries organically combined with the past, the current, the East and the West in harmony. It does not seem easy to get what meanings the artwork has, but it is astonishing enough to get audience’s attention only with the moving images.
Content & meaning
In general, all Miao Xiaochun’s digital works are an examination of fundamental issues of human existence—of past, present, and the potential future, of becoming and passing away, beginning, paradise, and end.[2]
The meaning of the term, Out of Nothing is from Chinese four characters idiom, 無中有生[3] which means ‘all things come from naught’, and its basis is from a philosophy book called Tao Te Ching written by Lao-tzu who is a prominent Chinese philosopher. Everything is created as a physical shape and can be explained as an entity but all creatures’ start is made out of nothing. The notion of existence can be formed only when the notion of naught exists.
In Miao Xiaochun’s digital painting, The Neo-Cubism Out of Nothing seems to illustrate the existence and vanishment of human beings through the Hellfire, in which there are people chained together, standing around the inferno and very tiny people floating in the air on the top of the flames. In the blazing inferno, floating arms and people can be seen behind a curtain, which looks like a burning box. In another scene, several people are standing around a lying person whose figure is not completed yet but when his shape gets completed, the people’s figure gets uncompleted conversely, and then the lying person’s body becomes separated into pieces and goes into a paper box. Miao might want to depict where we come from, where we go, how meaningless our physical body is, and what is the difference between our real life and the life in the Hellfire.
Exhibition Technique
Miao Xiaochun used 3D Max software to produce the artwork. He made use of a 3-D scanner to scan his body,[4] and this would be like another kind of photography for him. So those who appear in the video are his avatars. The Neo-Cubism Out of Nothing is an installation of a 3D computer animation with five neo-cubist synchronized projections. All the sides of the image are different and portray the possibilities of change for the image. The video is shown on the five surfaces of the white hexahedral box by five projectors, which creates a main stage that seems located inner the box. The cube portrays the space and the virtual people but the video even catches details of the cutting shape of people when they move.
References
Author
Ewon Moon