Title: Microcosm

Artist: Miao Xiaochun

Work date: 2009

Materials: 3D computer animation

Length: 15 min 55 sec

Region: Chinese

Courtesy Miao Xiaochun’s Studio

All Rights Reserved

The 21st century visual language and means employed by Miao Xiaochun in Microcosm convey burning issues of the contemporary world: environmental crisis, violence, wars, and the necessity for human cooperation. Without delving into the meanings of a plethora of Bosch's allegories, Miao Xiaochun constructs a world of radically different metaphors by changing the content, figures, background and facilities. As the artist says, the allegories in Microcosm "reflect modern people's views on life and death, their desires, and their view on humans' weaknesses." They are also embodiments of the artist's personal feelings and reflections.

                                        --An Excerpt from "Perface for Miao Xiaochun: Microcosm" by Walsh Gallery in May, 2009

Although Miao Xiaochun’s Microcosm is based on Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, he turned the traditional Chinese idiom “looking up the sky from the well” into “looking down the well from the sky” (this is the literary translation of “Microcosm”). If the idiom “looking up the sky from the well” is used to descript a person with limited sight and knowledge who has difficulty in understanding the nature of things, then “looking down the well from the sky” means if a person is put into a macro environment to examine micro things, he would have difficulties to understand the nature of things too. In these two phrases, the spectator’s positions are changed, but he encounters the same limits in understanding things, which shows the significance of this work. Microcosm is not to rebuild the trueness of historic image, rather it is to reinterpret and convert the historic image and derive new meanings from the image spectrum, or to de-structure the historic meaning by using an artist’s own emotions, or to take care of and translate the target from personal visual experiences, so as to create a psychological medium analysis—to recompile modern images in the tangled relations among reality and virtual reality.

                                          --An Exerpt from "Miao Xiaochun: Microcosm – A Modern Allegory" by Huang Du, 2009