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FABRIK cover article
What Can I Say About Mei?
SEPTEMBER 14, 2012 by PHIL TARLEY
Move over David Lachapelle and Pierre et Gilles. Get back Wang Qingsong.
Here comes Mei Xian Qui. Eastern themes of post Chairman Mao politics enliven a bizarre dialog in Mei’s highly original, super sexy, uber-feminine photography. Mei is a quintessential Los Angeles artist, whipping up images in which Asian and Western themes implode in a delightful mélange of post modern sensibility.
LET A THOUSAND FLOWERS BLOOM, HOLLYWOODLAND (2010)Mei’s photographs take me into a world I’ve never seen before. Many allude to classic western tableaux, a nod to her painterly background. But then Mei infuses her work with a dramatic narrative. She catches her models in moments filled with expectancy and anticipation. She poses her characters, which are often gender ambiguous, as if they are in a play. Her actors often allude to a sexual back story, and seem to promise a big surprise at the end, after they have left her stage.
Mei Xian Qiu was born in the town of Pekalongan, on the island of Java, Indonesia, to a third generation Chinese minority family. She has lived all over Europe, is based in Los Angeles and makes frequent trips back to China. “I feel 100% Chinese Indonesian, and 100% American. I am a part of a kind of floating culture. My sense of individual identity becomes linked to something ever shifting and transient.”
I first met the Mei Xian Qui through the Los Angeles Art Association – we are both artist members. Peter Mays, the association’s director thrilled to promote her work, was quite proud that his Gallery 825 could provide a launch pad for her stratospheric career trajectory. Mei is blowing up big. At their Photo LA booth, her photographs sold handsomely. Then the L.A. Art Association took the artist to Basel Switzerland, where she sold every work she showed and took orders for five additional pieces. Peter was delighted and plans to take Mei to Art Basel Miami Beach in December. “I love her work; it’s timely, contemporary and challenging.”
I have watched Mei’s photography mature and marry her diverse inspirations to their current incarnation, which she renders in Plexiglas. Mei prints onto the Plexiglas itself allowing a gentle backlight to infuse her imagery. Against a delicate palette of tropical birds and pink flowers, this soft kiss of backlight lays down a gossamer femininity and lightness that leaves me gender intrigued and scratching my head in delight wondering what is really going on in her photographs. The artist, sweet-natured and quick-smiled,
cultivates an air of purposeful mystery.
Rex Bruce, director of LACDA, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, who showed the artist a few months ago, told me, “Mei Xian Qui is an artist with the perfect balance of humor, politics, multiculturalism and visual pleasure. Her images are exquisite and irresistible—her peculiar combinations of gay love, Chinese takeover, and L.A. pop sensibility illicit a sense of surprise in the onlooker.”
How gay is Mei? Can the work of an Asian woman on Plexiglas really evoke gay anyway? And what is gay today? In her post-modern world of ethnic diversity, can’t we all be gay for a day? Half the fun in Mei’s work is trying to decode the artist’s campy, sometimes zany, quasi-political iconography.
Mei Xian Qui is about process-melding her Asian and Los Angeles identities to constantly collide in clever, amusing and surprising ways. Her work is adorable, campy art that has both pith and ash. Who could ask for more? Resistance is futile. I’m wanting a piece to hang on my living room wall.
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Art Spot at Art Basel Miami — 12. 2012
Booth — Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts:
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Art Basel Miami — Ping Pong Projectraum
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art fair / gallery shots
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ZOOM Winter Issue 2012
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Living etc. (U.K.)
(above the fireplace)
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yosune george design blog/ http://www.fromyosunewithlove.com/2012/home-decor/mei-xain-qius-work-of-art/
Nov2012
On Saturday I was walking through an Art Opening in Los Angeles when I ran into Mei Xian’s work. At first the bright colors and the big canvases are what caught my attention and suddenly I was hooked. Her work is full of irony, meaning and poetry. Mei was born in Java, Indonesia from Chinese parents, they migrated to California when she was very young spending her life between the US and China as a parental attempt to not being westernized. You can see her life in her juxtaposed work of photography, glass and illustration. Beautifully displayed against the light making all the layers and colors come to life. Her work not surprisingly ended up in the pages of Living ETC, UK for the May issue. I really enjoyed meeting Mei; she was warm and eager to explain her work to me and eager to know about other people’s juxtaposed lives as well. Enjoy!
Photos via: Mei Xian Qiu
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L E N S C R A T C H / Saturday, October 23, 2010
Mei Xian Qiu
Los Angeles photographer, Mei Xian Qiu, mixes her identities and influences in her new exhibition, Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom, opening at Gallery 825 in Los Angeles on October 16 and running through November 12th.
“Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom,” is a series of photographs exploring anxieties of power and globalism, national and intercultural identity, and the notion of non self-constructed and deconstructed individualism. The photographs present a sweet conceit of romance and violence. The subjects’ posture and expression remain sentimental, vulnerable and unformed, yet there is a hidden danger signaled by their military uniforms and the environment.
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The models for the imagery are Pan Asian Americans who could be perceived as Chinese, artists, and academics specializing in Chinese studies. The costumes are taken from a Beijing photography studio that specializes in “get ups” for foreign tourists to re-enact Cultural Revolution Propaganda imagery.
A Kafkaesque tongue and cheek frolic of the takeover of the United States of America, “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom,” takes its cues and title directly and indirectly from classic Chinese poetry, the Cultural Revolution Maoist movement, and Anselm Keifer’s series of paintings of the same name. It refers to the popular Western mistranslation of the Chinese poem “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend (????, ????).” Echoing Kiefer’s earlier portrayals of himself in sieg Heil salute to come to terms with his country’s brutal Nazi past, Kiefer’s “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom” showed Mao Zedong in the Chinese salute.
Mao used this poem to encourage a variety of views in the “arts and sciences,” and begin the Hundred Flowers Movement. He proclaimed that in a great society the arts, academia, and “a hundred schools of thought contend.” As a result, artists and academics came out of hiding and there was a brief flowering of culture before they were hunted down and destroyed.
ART PLATFORM — LOS ANGELES
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