Miao Xiachun’s recent work transforms paintings from the canon of Western art history into photographic and animated computer models. Microcosm is based on Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th century masterpiece The Garden of Earthly Delights. It is an imaginative reinvention of its sumptuous landscape of sin and salvation, where new digital means and computer technologies have allowed Miao Xiaochun to conjure a contemporary visual vocabulary. He abolishes the traditional fixed single-point perspective aesthetic, instead favouring the Chinese tradition of multiple points of view, which he constructs into a world of radically different metaphors and tangled relations among reality and virtual reality. In his remake of this work for the AVIE 360 degree immersive 3D cinema, Miao has taken Microcosm a spectacular step further, literally placing the viewer in the centre of its phantasmagoric universe.

Miao Xiaochun successfully uses 3D technology to create upon a 2D image a virtual 3D scene, to transform a still canvas into moving images, concurrently changing the traditional way of viewing paintings and giving a completely new interpretation and significance to a masterpiece of art, especially with the striking use of his idiosyncratic imagination about history and the future. His works add another important example to contemporary negotiations with art history, and open up new potential for art as he experiments with new possibilities, taking a step forward into new potential spheres.

http://cmc.scm.cityu.edu.hk/en/events/microcosm.html