Siemens Home Appliances Art Space has organized a series of art exhibitions for charity in 2010. After a refrigerator painting exhibition and an event of wash-machine roller art, Siemens Home Appliances Art Space, for the first time, organizes young artists’ collection exhibition. Upon organizers’ request, I recommended three young artists who are in their twenties. These young fellows, who shied away from major social events in their works, share a similar artistic interest in exploring inner self through the joy of being with nature. 

Both Jiao Song and Xiaolong Zhang’s works have a flavor of fairy-tales. While Jiao put more emphasis on cultivating a certain atmosphere, Xiaolong added more symbolic elements in his works. The two of them and Pai Peng all belong to the ‘internet’ generation. Growing up in an information-overload environment, the sensitive nerve of young people might make them feel like a deer in headlight. It is arguable that lacking of certain information might stimulate a child’s confidence and desire to change the environment. A sense of powerless is very appealing to this new internet generation. Just like the way Jiao put it “Individual is so petty and fragile in this boundless world. Life is short yet felt like forever. We are nomads who always want to hold on something. We are burning in our own desire yet thirst for the inner peace. Is there a quiet resting shrine as we have always dreamed?”

Look inside, A delicate soul in the corner; Look outside, a fallen flower and flying beetles catch ‘my’ eyes. “Flowers always fall, river never stays”. A fallen flower and a couple of flying beetles seem to have Jiao swept away by a wave of self pity. “Mortals are constantly struggling”; “The grace of fallen flower nourishes a new life. A homeless beetle won’t rest until it finds the dreamed home”. Thus, Jiao created a wonderland full of flowers, beetles and sprouts with her child-like innocent. Her paintings’ most prominent theme is the red, green or blue soil-like shapes that takes up large space. These rich-colored shapes, painted by composite materials, symbolize ‘nutrition’. These are the principle materials that nurture lives in Jiao’s imaginary world. Kind of like the Palace or the forest in the fairy tales. These are the places where stories unfold. On these ‘nurturing lands’, groups of sprout-like life forms or lines of flying beetles live happily and freely. Jiao creates a micro wonderland that is magical, innocent, colorful and rhythmic.

I wouldn’t appreciate Xiaolong’s works from an environmentalist perspective. I would rather think of his paintings as fables. These fables depict, in the artists own words, “the beauty and complexity of inhabited nature with a mysterious and aesthetic style”. Every painting tells us a conundrum. His style originates in one of the traditions of Realistism-story telling. However, Xiaolong did not compose the story line according to a day-to-day logic. Thus, his paintings make us feel like reading conundrum. He also gave animals human-like attributes, which added more symbolic elements in his paintings. In this created world, the audience can re-arrange the relationship between humans and animals or between man and nature. Thus, we are inspired to contemplate what actually happened in the world we live in.

Pai Peng said those ancient gardens are “ever beyond my comprehension. So mysterious!”. In fact, the traditional Chinese culture has lost its meaning not only to the new generation, but also to a few generations before them. In the process of century’s industrialization, the protection of traditions is taking a back seat. This nation has not taken good care of most of the relics including those ancient gardens. The original beauty has long gone just like the process of Pai’s creation-distorting the original pictures. He took those mysterious gardens as the subjects of his paintings. He used a digital camera to “record, copy, past, save” the images onto canvas. Then he distorted certain parts of the images. This is what I called Magic Mirror Effect. It is an allegory of how a modern man perceives a relic of the past. Of course, different man has a different Magic Mirror.