Image + Imagination - Miao Xiaochun
Osage Contemporary Art Space
Reviewed: September 2
Based on Michelangelo's fresco in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel, Miao Xiaochun's The Last Judgment in Cyberspace is a series of three-dimensional, computer-generated prints and an animation that allow viewers to see the painting from various perspectives - including from within and even behind the original work.
High-quality, monochrome prints of computer-generated sections of the painting reveal an elaborate reworking of the masterpiece - but stripped of all character or emotion. Instead of tortured or ecstatic souls, we find only gestures and hollow forms, as eyeless, plastic figures, based on the artist himself, float in a grey, cloud-filled representation of Michelangelo's world.
This is a boisterous appropriation. A canvas print covers half the gallery's floor, precisely matching the original's dimensions. Small and large prints are hung in one half, while the video plays through an odd cut-out entrance in the other.