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Podcast Interview with Mei Xian Qiu

by on in Interviews – Fine Art Photographers

Mei Xian Qiu is a Chinese, American, and Indonesian fine art photographer. This is the second interview with Mei — the first since the audio podcast was launched.  Mei’s work is rich in metaphor and meanings, and she has had tremendous success. In the following interview, she opens up about her history and how her unique visualizations came to be.

All Photos © Mei Xian Qiu

Photos of Mei Xian Qiu by Ken Weingart

A Hundred Flowers Bloom When China Invades

Open SearchPosted inOpinion

A Hundred Flowers Bloom When China Invades

by An XiaoApril 26, 2012Print

Mei Xian Qiu, “8099” (all images courtesy the artist)

LOS ANGELES — In 1957, Mao Zedong launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign. It was to be a glorious liberalization, an flourishing of the arts, intellectualism and culture. A few weeks later, threatened by the tide of criticism sweeping in, the Communist Party would crack down on their blooming flowers. Mao’s declaration to “let a hundred flowers bloom” is often mistranslated as “Let a thousand flowers bloom.”

Mei Xian Qiu, “In the Manner of Gabrielle D’Estrees”

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom, a photographic series by Los Angeles artist Mei Xian Qiu, pays reference to this brief period in Chinese history. The first place winner of the 2012 juried competition at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Flowers is a series of digital photos on Plexiglas that depict, as Qiu’s introductory placard says, “a Chinese takeover of the United States.”

The installation at LACDA creates an ominous vibe to the show, as two of the men from the photos kiss in black-and-white slow motion while an ambient soundtrack resounds through the space. But the takeover, far from a bloody invasion, is filled with cherry blossoms, a “sweet conceit of romance and violence,” as Qiu writes in her 2011 statement.

Qiu plays with this inversion and cross-cultural exchange further by working not with Chinese nationals but “Pan Asian Americans who could be perceived as Chinese,” as well as artists and academics who study classical China. The military uniforms themselves come from a photography studio in Beijing that allows foreign visitors to re-enact images from the Cultural Revolution. And the battle more often comes in the form of kissing and holding flowers.

AThe images, already strong, are just the start of a larger series exploring this topic. Qiu tells me she has plans to do “different storylines,” with “different little substories of the main story.” Qiu’s series, like China’s rise on the world stage, is complex and fascinating.Mei Xian Qiu, “8990”

Pacific Asia Museum

Mei Xian Qiu
Dewi Cantik (Pretty Darling); the Parade
All images are courtesy of dnj Gallery
We Are Here: Contemporary Art and Asian Voices in Los Angeles
March 13 – June 14, 2020

We Are Here: Contemporary Art and Asian Voices in Los Angeles brings attention to the dynamic voices in our diverse metropolis that extend viewers’ knowledge and understanding of the Asia Pacific region. The exhibition highlights seven female contemporary artists of diverse Asian Pacific heritages living and working in Los Angeles. These artists engage with and draw from their lives and family histories to create compelling works of art that invite visitors to think about their own experiences and heritage. Interwoven in their works are personal and universal narratives that give voice to the plural community we call home. This show seeks to inspire visitors to discover connections across boundaries and see that Asian art is expansive and complicated Exhibited Artworks.

We Are Here: Contemporary Art and Asian Voices in Los Angeles places the art and voices of the exhibited artists as the central themes leading the visitor through the galleries. Organization of the exhibition will be by artist, with their words accompanying their images. A variety of media will be represented in the exhibition, including painting, photography, and video. Artists’ videos will be projected onto walls in the gallery space. Throughout the galleries, small screens will present short mini documentaries about each artist and will be produced by the USC Pacific Asia Museum.

Exhibition Artists. Each of the exhibited artists is actively engaged with developing artworks that address complex themes in a variety of media:

Mei Xian Qiu draws from her personal history to reconstruct the unknown, fantastical notions of culture, self-invented and revelatory and iconic. This type of flexible self-view and easy piercings of notions of the impermeable interior self, are in keeping with the new contemporary landscape of commonplace transience and a growing global monoculture.  

 Reanne Estrada is an artist with a happily schizophrenic practice. She uses performance and object-making to examine the unstable nature of identity and the fragility of the body. Estrada often collaborates with other artists to create performance events that investigate cultural and gendered meaning in contemporary society.
Phung Huynh draws from her heritage of survival and migration as a refugee from the Vietnam War. Her paintings investigate the shifting notions of cultural identity in an American setting. The work she is producing for We Are Hereexamines the experience of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees in Southern California
Ann Le uses her work as a way to explore her family’s history within the larger context of war. She excavates her lineage by revisiting her family’s experiences. Using archived family photos and stories, Le’s works are layers of images, building upon each other, often touching on emigration, history, family, and memory.
Ahree Lee looks to the past and across distances to investigate what constitutes individual or collective identity in an increasingly diasporic, culturally alienated and fractured world. Her video and mixed media work reveals hidden narratives and patterns embedded in identity, gender expectations, community, family and culture.
Kaoru Mansour grew up surrounded by nature and continues to look to the natural world in her paintings. She tinkers with materials and images to create compositions and surfaces that are both sensuous and irreverent, personal and universal.
Sichong Xie utilizes performance, video, and installation to explore her identity and place in the world as an expatriate Chinese citizen. She investigates sculptural forms and movements within global communities to reconsider and re-envision shared spaces and performative practices.

Vienna Exchange Show

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Los Angeles Art Association is pleased to announce the reception of Streetlife / Straßenleben: Vienna meets LA opening at Gallery 825 on February 8.  Streetlife / Straßenleben is a very special exchange exhibition featuring Los Angeles artists and artists from the gallery STEINER in Vienna opening at Gallery 825 on February 8 from 7-10pm (runs through February 11, 2020). Streetlife / Straßenleben is curated by Corinna Steiner.

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Streetlife / Straßenleben: Vienna meets LA features artists: Bibi Davidson, Eva Dvorak, Wolfgang Fürst, Dwora Fried, Kim Kimbro, Dan Monteavaro, Elisabeth Nagy, Mei Xian Qiu, Elvira Rajek, Elke Schmölzer and Susan Swihart.

Reception: Saturday, February 8, 2020, 7 – 10 pm

Show runs : February 8 – 11, 2020

Where: Gallery 825 
825 N. La Cienega Boulevard, 
Los Angeles, CA 90069

Round Hole Square Peg 4

“Round Hole Square Peg” Is a Sexy, Thrilling Celebration of Queer Art

The latest installment of the international photo competition captures a provocative world of beefcakes, religious icons, and “tranimals.”by Lester Fabian Brathwaite 2/7/2020

“I am the only fellow of the American Film Institute that’s ever been inducted into the Gay Porn Hall of Fame,” Phil Tarley tells me at his booth at Photo L.A., California’s longest-running international photo art fair, standing among a selection of provocative and unequivocally queer images. “I like to push that sometimes.”

That dubious distinction, this gleeful mixing of the highbrow and lowbrow, runs through much of Tarley’s work and the selections he curates for “Round Hole Square Peg,” a photo exhibition and competition described as “the only queer presentation at any of the major art fairs.”

Opening at Long Hall Gallery in West Hollywood, Saturday, 2/8/2020 at 6 –9:30

Woven Threads Exhibit

Diversity inspires L.A. curator’s Brandstater Gallery exhibit

 01/02/2020 –  Arts+Culture –  Author: Darla Martin Tucker

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Los Angeles artist Gary Brewer noticed the diversity of La Sierra University’s student body while teaching a campus class, and was inspired to design an exhibit communicating the importance of cultural variety to the national character.Images of art works by Fatemeh Burnes appearing in the “Woven Threads” exhibit at Brandstater Gallery.Images of works by Iva Gueorguieva who composes enormous paintings and stained pieces of muslin in vibrant hues.Photographic images by artist Mei Xian Qiu draw upon the fluid and ever-shifting identities that have comprised her life.Los Angeles artist Alison Saar’s work connects with the myths and stories from Africa, the Caribbean and South America, as well as the history of race and racism in the United States.

A long-time artist and noted arts writer, Brewer curated the show “Woven Threads: The Migration of Myths & Metaphors ” exclusively for La Sierra’s Brandstater Gallery featuring the works of four artists — Alison Saar, Iva Gueorguieva, Fatemeh Burnes, and Mei Xian Qiu, respectively representing the United States, Bulgaria, Iran and Asia. They will exhibit their prints, paintings and sculptures Jan. 13 – Feb. 13 and will participate in an artists’ reception on Sunday, Jan. 26 at 6 p.m. at the gallery.

Brewer taught an art history class during this year’s fall quarter for La Sierra’s Art+Design program. He arrived at La Sierra through his friendship with Assistant Professor of Art Tim Musso who is also director of Brandstater Gallery.

“I wanted the show to reflect the positive impact of immigrants bringing their stories and cultures to America,” said Brewer. “We are so fortunate to live in a country and especially the Los Angeles area that has such a rich tapestry of people from all parts of the globe. It makes the world so much richer.”

Brewer has written essays about all four artists whose works he loves, he says, and describes their artistic insights, perspectives, practices and vastly differing backgrounds in eloquent style. They are included in the Brandstater Gallery “Woven Threads” exhibit’s 40-page catalog in which Brewer states, “Each of us has migrated from another part of the world, either recently or in deep time. … This exhibition brings together four important Los Angeles artists, each with a unique history, coming from different worlds and using their stories to inform and shape the content of their art.”

In the early 1990s Gueorguieva traveled to America as a child with her family who sought political asylum, and Burnes, born in Iran, came to the states at age 16. Qiu, of both Chinese and Indonesian descent, was born and raised in Indonesia at a time when Chinese were banished from the country, and came to the U.S. as a teen.

Saar, an African American artist raised in Los Angeles through her art connects with her ancestry and the myths and stories from Africa, the Caribbean and South America, as well as the history of race and racism in the United States. She employs sculpture, drawing, painting and printmaking.

“Their traditions are an asset to our culture,” Brewer said of the artists, “a culture whose fluidity and dynamic character, at its best, embraces and welcomes the richness of different people who bring with them their stories and ideas, and that enlarges the richness of our world.”

Saar’s sculptures and graphic work draw stylistically from folk art, German expressionism and African sculpture. “Her sculptures have their own personal vocabulary that speaks in a direct language about history, race, and mythology. If her sculptures are the melodies that capture one’s soul, the narratives behind them are the lyrics,” writes Brewer in a 2018 piece for “Hyperallergic,” an online arts publication. His articles are also included in a catalog for the Brandstater exhibit in which Brewer writes that Saar’s pieces in the show “represent a range of techniques that she employs to convey her ideas. … Her sculptures have a powerful presence and use the pure emotional force of form to shape the subjective content of her narratives.”

Burnes’ fluid, free-associated improvisational-style paintings are formed of layers and splashes, with ghosts of images invoking architecture, Islamic patterns and figures, places and memories. The works ultimately represent elements of her own history or matters of personal importance. “Her passionate embrace of the world with all of the suffering and beauty informs these improvised narratives,” states Brewer.

“These are complex paintings; they are ambitious and beautiful, they seduce and draw one close to see hidden details where shapes become protean forms – looking like a musical note, a figure, the muscle and sinew of the body, or a map,” he writes in a 2018 essay for “Art and Cake,” a contemporary arts magazine. He also wrote pieces for the publication about Gueorguieva and Qiu and their work.

Gueorguieva composes enormous paintings and stained pieces of muslin in vibrant hues of geometric slants and lines, bright, interwoven, interlayered bits of experiences, insights, feeling and recollection. The artist refers to the large works as tapestries, says Brewer, and “seeks to turn the world of painting upside down” by hanging the canvas loose on the wall and by cutting openings in it and placing strips and bunches of material on the surface, he said in the exhibit catalog. “She drips, pours, stains and dips the shreds of muslin and canvas in pigments, creating visually and physically complex monumental pieces.”

Brewer writes in a 2017 essay, “Iva’s paintings are like a river of ideas, their movement reshaping the landscape around us. It is a place where the dynamics of memory, ideas, images and primal forces are translated into visual dramas.”

Qiu’s intricately and beautifully composed photographic images, often displayed on sheets of mounted plexiglass or suspended off a white background when framed, Brewer writes, draw upon the fluid and ever-shifting identities that have comprised her life, continual adjustments which as a child were necessary for her family’s survival. She is an artist “who sees the illusive nature of self as a form of potential,” he states. “Her art is an expression of magical realism, where history and identity are a reflection of her life experiences that have given her insight into endless possibilities of transformation and renewal.”

In the 2019 essay Brewer describes Qiu as “an artist who sees the fugitive nature of self as a form of potential. Her art is an expression of magical realism where history, identity and self are a reflection of her life experiences that have given her insight into the endless possibilities of transformation and renewal.”

Brewer, a native of California, has exhibited his own nature-inspired paintings in galleries and museums in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. His works are included in private, corporate and museum collections around the United States. While his art will not be included in the Woven Threads show, he is planning an exhibition of his own at Brandstater Gallery in January 2021, he said.

Los Angeles Art Association is proud to present Multiple Feeds, an online and gallery video presentation with a unique design that allows the viewing audience to create and post their own video content in response to the videos by artists. The artists’ videos will be played alongside the videos created in response at Gallery 825, creating a dialog between the artists and the audience.

Los Angeles Art Association is proud to present Multiple Feeds, an online and gallery video presentation with a unique design that allows the viewing audience to create and post their own video content in response to the videos by artists. The artists’ videos will be played alongside the videos created in response at Gallery 825, creating a dialog between the artists and the audience.

When: Saturday, April 6, 2019  6 – 9 pm 
             (show runs through May 3).?

Where: Gallery 825, 825 N. La Cienega Boulevard, 
             Los Angeles, CA 90069