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WEHOVILLE ARTICLE

New WeHo Park Mural Suggests Make Love, Not War
Mon, Nov 07, 2016

By Staff
From the “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom” series by Mei Xian Qiu.
“Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom; 8990,” a mural by Los Angeles-based artist Mei Xian Qiu, has just been installed in West Hollywood Park. Presented by the City of West Hollywood through WeHo Arts, the large format piece [9 x 9 feet] is located on the ground floor of the five-story parking structure adjacent to West Hollywood Park and West Hollywood Library. It will remain on view through July 2017.

The image is from a series of photographs that imagines a mock Chinese invasion of the United States. Hidden political dangers are suggested, but rather than being urgently addressed, are put aside momentarily, subsumed to the romance of the Chinese cultural revolution-era’s notion of “the beautiful idea.”

While employing familiar symbolism and historical dystopianism, the work also explores the quest for an inner utopia, a theme common to Xian Qiu’s body of work. As well, the piece references the past yet boldly faces the future – affirmatively critical, specifically with respect to globalism, the identity of the self, the social landscape, post-colonialism and that of the larger national body politic.

Mei Xian Qiu
“I thought about if soldiers were countries – what would they do?” said Mei Xian Qiu. “Get into bed with each other, court each other, as governments do? It deals with the issue of identity as something that we create, and how others perceive that in a cultural sense. Especially as urban people, we’ve become so removed from any type of indigenous existence. It leads me to recreate my own fantasy of cultural identity.”

The title plays off Mao Zedong’s quote “Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” Taken from classical Chinese poetry, this line originated in a 1956 speech in which the then chairman of the Peoples’ Republic of China Communist Party seemingly launched a movement supporting liberalization and freedom.

Mao used the slogan to proclaim a great society where free speech and debate would flourish – as a result, artists, academics, and intellectuals came out of hiding and there was a brief flowering of culture. As the campaign gathered pace, intellectuals began to criticize censorship, the Soviet economic model and human rights abuses. Mao had underestimated the amount of dissent and in 1957 altered his speech to say that intellectual freedom was only valid when it contributed to strengthening communism, sending anyone who contradicted into labor camps.

Throughout Mei Xian Qiu’s “Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom” series, the models are Pan Asian and American artists and academics specializing in Chinese culture, the very sorts of people at risk in a Hundred Flowers Movement. The costumes include discarded U.S. military uniforms, cheongsams constructed for the photographs and Chinese mock ups taken from a Beijing photography studio, specializing in outfits for foreign tourists to re-enact Cultural Revolution propaganda imagery.

Mei Xian Qiu’s own story clearly informs her work. She was born in the town of Pekalongan, on the island of Java, Indonesia, to a third generation Chinese minority family – when it was illegal to be Chinese in Java. Her village had no cars, just horse-drawn carts and bicycles.

At birth, her parents gave her multiple names – Chinese, American and Indonesian – in preparation for societal collapse and variant potential futures. In the aftermath of their homeland’s Chinese and Communist genocide, the family emigrated from Java to the United States. During her childhood, she was moved back and forth several times between the two countries as her parents weighed what they perceived as the amorality of life in the West against the uncertainty of life in Java.

Partially as a result of a growing sense of restlessness, her father joined the U.S. Air Force and the family lived throughout the country, sometimes staying in one place for just a month at a time. The artist has also been based in Europe, China, and Indonesia as an adult (www.meixianqiu.com).

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The Huffington Post
Artists as Activists: Pursuing Social Justice
09/06/2016 10:19 am ET | Updated Sep 06, 2016 by Amy Pleasant

The Bird Cage by Xian Mei Qiu. Image courtesy of the artist and Gutfreund Cornett Art.

We must never forget art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
John F. Kennedy

Some might say that the world is a mess right now. Others point out that it could be worse. In our war torn world, it depends on who you are and the place that you live. In light of the ever-growing list of crises crossing all borders and cultures, the curatorial partnership of Guttfreund Cornett Art has mobilized a group of 86 artists to address this escalation of violence, human rights violations, and environmental concerns. Throughout history, art has reflected its time. Art mirrors the aesthetic standard of the day and also provides a window into the historical context of the time. Works such as Andy Warhol’s, Big Electric Chair or Picasso’s Guernica serve as iconic reminders and powerful statements on social issues of their time. Artists often see their place to provoke, to voice, to enlighten. This long-standing role of the artist as activist is at the heart of “Social Change: It Happens to One, It Happens to All”, an art exhibition taking place at Saint Mary’s College of Art in Morago, CA September 18 – December 11, 2016.

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“DRAWN. PRINTED. BOUND.” – Tom of Finland Arts and Culture Festival

September 21, 2016 by Phil Tarley

THE CRITICAL EYE by PHIL TARLEY

DRAWN. PRINTED. BOUND.
Tom of Finland Arts and Culture Festival

October 1 -2, 2016

Shortly after Taschen Books published their gargantuan collection of Tom of Finland’s best work, the Museum of Contemporary Art featured TOF in a major exhibition, effectively bringing his brown paper bagged portraits of male nudes out from porn shops, where the works had always lived. The MOCA exhibit was the first time an American museum mounted a show that showed men mounting each other. When Rizzoli’s TOM HOUSE, published, I went to the David Kordansky Gallery for the book signing party. Kordansky is now selling original works of the Finnish, master-illustrator, for six figure sums. Clearly, TOF has arrived as potent force on the international art scene. Two films, a documentary and a narrative feature are in post production. MOCA’S TOF presentation and the Getty’s companion Mapplethorpe show with LACMA, are break through exhibitions that mirror the Tom Of Finland Foundation’s raison d’être: fighting sex phobia in the art world, and by extension, in the world at large.

This year marks the 21st annual Tom of Finland Art and Culture Festival, and its taking over the entire landmark property, called TOM HOUSE, where Tom of Finland Foundation has operated since 1984. The Festival is one of the key public events initiated and run by the Foundation, and serves as a platform to further its mission of preserving, protecting and promoting erotic art. This year’s program will focus on art and printed matter, with special guests that include artists and independent brands that specialize in printmaking across various mediums within gay culture.

The Festival will encompass works by more than 30 artists, literati and independent brands, both emerging and established, from all over the world. This is one sexy, well hung show. It’s always been daring and fun. Some of the best work have a wild, fierce intensity. Along with art for sale by their makers, an array of entertainment and activities over the course of the two dates are planned. Visitors will also have the opportunity to tour TOM House, including the attic space that served as Tom of Finland’s bedroom and studio.

Durk Dehner, President of the TOF foundation believes that, “art and books have brought beauty into our lives and introduced audiences to the vast span of the wonders of the creative world. The Foundation, with its library and archives, celebrates both artist and publisher at our Festival this year with a sumptuous representation of both.”

Galleries include: Please Do Not Enter, Rick Castro/Antebellum, Round Hole Square Peg/AC Gallery   and Ruben Esparza Curatorial.  Some of the artists represented are: Alton DuLaney, Boston Elements,  Gio Black Peter, Homo Riot, Jeremy Lucida, Lockwood 51, Michael Kirwan, Miguel Angel Reyes, Mei Xian Qiu, Pansy Ass, Starrfucker, Valentine and Van Jazmin. There will be music by RocketManLA.

The fair will be open on Saturday and Sunday from 11 am – 6 PM. And there is a Saturday fashion show and party from 6 -11pm. TOM HOUSE is located at 1421 Laveta Terrace, Los Angeles (Echo Park). Visit Eventbrite for tickets or the Foundation for more information. HERE

Tagged Please Do Not ENTER, Tom of Finland

About Phil Tarley

Phil Tarley is a fellow of the American Film Institute, an artist member of the Los Angeles Art Association and writes about contemporary art, pop culture and photography for Fabrik Magazine. He curates at the A C Gallery in Los Angeles and founded Round Hole Square Peg, a biannual, international survey of LGBTQ photography shown at the Photo LA. Tarley is also a critical essayist for Katharine T. Carter & Associates, an art advisory service that  helps artists obtain museum exhibitions. His personal series of political and ethnographic videos is housed in the permanent collection of the New York Public Library and has screened in film festivals and museums like the American Film Institute,and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 2009, under his nom de porn, Phil St. John, Tarley was inducted into the Gay Porn Hall of Fame for his 20-year producing and directing career. His writing and photography have also appeared in the LA Times, the LA Weekly, The WOW Report, Adventure Journal, the Advocate, Frontiers, Adult Video News, Genre, Instinct and American Photo Magazine. His book, Going down On Cuba: Notes from An Underground Traveler,  is slated to be published later in the year by Fabrik Press.

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AMERICAN PHOTO MAGAZINE
www.americanphotomag.com

Creating a New Visual Archetype for LGBTQ Photography at Photo LA

“We need a new way to see who we are”
By Kathleen Caulderwood Posted Yesterday at 9:23am
© Mei Xian Qiu

“The Lovers”

When photographer and art critic Phil Tarley was viewing a recent LGBTQ photo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, he found himself disappointed.

Even though 2015 was the year the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage is constitutional right and that Caitlin Jenner rose to international fame as a trans woman, none of this evolution was reflected in the photographs on display.

“They should be showing the hottest, cutting-edge stuff, but instead they had a show filled with mid last-century white men. No women, no people of color and no transsexuality,” he recalls. “We need a new way to see who we are, a new visual archetype.”

“The Round Hole, Square Peg” exhibition, which will show at Photo L.A. from Jan. 21 -24, is an attempt to remedy this problem. The group show features innovative photography from artists on the new edge of LGBTQ art such as Josef Jasso, Michael Palladino, Brooke Mason and Franz Szony.

The exhibition is composed of two parts: one showcases images chosen by a panel of artists, critics and gallery owners from entries submitted through the Round Hole, Square Peg competition and a “Wall of Fame,” which was curated by Tarley. Curating the collection was a thrilling experience, he says—it gave him a fresh perspective on how the LGBT art community has changed since the “Round Hole, Square Peg” last showed at Photo LA in 2014.

According to Tarley, one of the most notable developments has been the acceptance and support of the transsexual community.

“Where we are, anyone today can adjust their dial anywhere on the male female continuum for an evening or the rest of their lives,” he says. Consequently, the genre of queer photography has shifted to include a wider variety of subjects, which has changed the tone of work. He sees it as moving away from the overtly sexual into a more spiritual side.

While curating the “ Wall of Fame” Tarley was interested in looking for work that had elements of staging and design, rather than traditional documentary work.

Tarley noted Franz Szony’s photograph “Familiars,” which will be featured on the “Wall of Fame” as an example of what he was looking for. It features an albino figure resting on a broomstick, surrounded by an array of flying creatures.

“The Lovers,” by Chinese-American artist and photographer Mei Xian Qiu, also features multiple layers. The subjects initially draw the viewer’s eye, but soon the complex and layered background comes into focus, as does the juxtaposition between the subjects’ military fatigues and the light spring scene.

“In the end, it just has to be great art,” Tarley says. “It has to knock my socks off.”

“Round Hole, Square Peg” will show at Photo LA from Jan. 21 – 24, 2016 at the REEF event center in Los Angeles, California. The show will then move to the Artist’s Corner gallery in Hollywood on Feb. 6 where it will remain on view through Feb. 20. The Artist’s Corner exhibition will also include an opening-night auction for the Trevor Foundation, a national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to young people in the LGBTQ community.

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LOS ANGELES TIMES    Paris Photo, Photo Independent fairs hit Hollywood this weekend

 

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HUFFINGTON POST  article

June 12, 2014 Huffpost Arts

Juri Koll

Mei Xian Qiu: It’s All in the Name

Posted: 06/10/2014 5:16 pm EDT Updated: 06/10/2014 5:59 pm EDT

My name has always been a matter of pride and wonder to me. Partly as a result, I traveled this year to Estonia, the land of my ancestors on my father’s side. We have a long history there, us Kolls. We originally come from a small village called Palamuse in the County of Jogeva and our last name is very old — it means ghost or “boogey man” and is a holdover from the pagan days.  I was not raised with Estonian tradition and always wondered just what that would have been like, given that it is a very small country. That’s why when I came upon Mei Xian Qiu’s work as part of my work with curator Peter Frank’s Trans Angeles show (which opened in April in Germany), I was intrigued and excited to find out who she was and perhaps know more about her history. http://youtu.be/K3uV8q005VU

It turns out she has 3 names. Being Chinese and raised in Indonesia, early in life she was subject to the cyclical violence and prejudice that gets whipped up by the people pulling the strings there. Her first given name is Indonesian: Siryana. The second is Chinese: Mei Xian Qiu. Her third name is American — Cinderella, or Cindy (which she was required to get while in Indonesia — just in case she ended up here.) Of course it was illegal to be Chinese — to practice its traditions — in Indonesia. When her family moved to the U.S. for the last time, escaping the genocide inflicted on the Chinese and looking for a new life, she embraced her heritage and set about finding out about it — including visiting China several times. She notes that stereotypes about the Chinese people are pervasive, and a majority of Chinese have shed their cultural heritage in favor of a more Western aesthetic, not just the many who have emigrated here. As part of that journey she moved from painting to photography to help her express her motivations and message.

Cherry Blossoms, 2012. Photograph on Plexiglass SubstrateUsing carefully staged — yet appearing completely natural – subjects of varying ethnicity according to where she is in her research, often dressed in clothes she designs and sews herself, she juxtaposes assumptions about ethnicity and custom with Pan Asian, Chinese, and Western motifs.

Jeremy Flower, 2010. Photograph on Plexiglass SubstrateMadonna, 2012. Photograph on Plexiglass SubstrateThe result is at once prescient and provoking. Whether one is able to recognize the people’s identity (sometimes mixed race), their personality comes through first, followed by objects and symbols that create questions about our understanding of their cultures. Or perhaps Mei Xian Qiu has created an illusion for us — their view of themselves — but either way it doesn’t matter. She has an innate ability to create an environment where the people in the photographs feel comfortable in their own skin.

                                White House, 2010. Photograph on Plexiglass Substrate

5 Star, 2010. Photograph on Plexiglass Substrate8801, 2012. Photograph on Plexiglass SubstrateDespite the often surrealistic nature of these tableaux, you feel like you’re actually there and empathize with the characters. When you place your own prejudices (we all have them) onto your initial view of the pictures, you find yourself asking some very important questions. Who are we? Does our global reach from one end of the earth to the other now require us to become homogenized just to survive? Does that alter the desire to stand out in a crowd? Can we actually be original in our work? These questions, and more, form the basis of Mei Xian Qiu’s extensive body of evocative, personal, yet worldly work, and illustrate for us how it can sometimes be all about what you call yourself. Mei Xian Qiu will be showing her photographs in Art Basel from from June 14 – August 1 during Los Angeles Contraventions at Galerie Merkel, Baslerstrasse 2, 79639 Grenzach-Wyhlen Germany. Trans Angeles – Crossover Experimentation’s first stop on it’s itinerary closed May 18 at the Kunstmuseum Wilhelm-Morgner-Haus in Soest, Germany. The video in this article is part of a long-form documentary about the creation of the exhibition being sponsored by the Venice Institute of Contemporary Art and directed by the author to be released later in 2014.

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Mei Xian Qiu @ Kopeikin Gallery

Mei Xian Qiu, The Nymph of the River Luo; Autumn, 2014. Archival pigment print on plexiglass, 40 X 40 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Mei Xian Qiu: Qilin Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles March 1 – April 19, 2014 By: MEGAN ABRAHAMS, MAY 2014 In the contemporary vein of photography that explores fictional vistas, in lieu of documenting reality, Mei Xian Qiu has constructed a haunting two-dimensional dystopia within glass borders, evolving from the theme Qilin. A benevolent Chinese mythical creature, the Qilin symbolizes hybridism and duality. It is said to appear at rare intervals as a harbinger of change and good luck. The name is a combination of the two characters qi (male), and lin, (female); and themes derived from or inspired by the Qilin are woven throughout this striking body of work. The images are the outcome of the artist’s inquiry into her own identity. She grew up a third-generation member of the persecuted Chinese minority in Java, Indonesia. After her family immigrated to the US, Qiu returned to China several times in a futile search for clues about her own background. Resolute, she adapted a collection of cultural archetypes as the foundation for constructing a version of a world in which to root and validate her own identity. In the course of constructing this concept of self, she realized a unique artistic vision replete with unexpected and surprising influences acquired on a circuitous journey. Qiu’s staged images present a fantasy worldview, both disturbing and alluring. Featuring role-playing actors and set in artfully altered derivative landscapes, her compositions are manipulated with devices like light boxes and hyper-pigmentation. Unique among the limited edition prints included in this series, Here is the Deepest Secret that Nobody Knows (2013), glows from within. The image is mounted in a light box, which exaggerates an already vivid palette with the added artifice of a lavender-rose hue. In this image a reclining female figure dressed in a pink satin cheong-sam with an incongruous military jacket thrown over her shoulders dominates the foreground. Dead flowers and branches surround her. The image is lush with vegetation and greenery, but also permeated with decay. As in much of Qiu’s work, a grim sense of irony prevails. Mei Xian Qiu, The Bird Cage, 2012. Archival print on plexiglass, 30 X 40 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Most of Qiu’s compositions are set outdoors in manipulated landscapes; one exception is The Bird Cage (2012). The setting is an interior, the black background distorting any sense of perspective. The subject is a woman’s head and torso, her head inside an ornate flower-strewn bird cage, a yellow bird perched on top. We see only the hand and tattooed arm of the figure holding the cage over her head. The woman’s face is carefully made-up, her hair coiffed. Adorned in jewelry — a rose quartz necklace, pearls, and dangling earrings — she looks up at her captor, as if merely questioning rather than resisting her predicament. The theme of duality surfaces in The Lovers (2012), which portrays two entwined female figures reclining in front of a distant tree-lined horizon. The background is tinted with a rosy sunset; yellow and pink flowers dominate the foreground. The female in front wears a pink corset. She gazes off in the distance, while her lover looks at her. Despite the infusion of warm rose hues, there is a cold and even stark quality to the landscape upon which the figures are superimposed. In a more recent work, The Nymph of the River Luo; Spring (2014), the duality concept is further explored. In this image, two female figures (both nymphs) embrace on a bench amid a profusion of Disney-pink blossoms connoting spring. The figures are bound together with a pink ribbon. Flowers and ribbons festoon the foreground, birds perch on the branches above. The scene is full of life, but devoid of joy, laden with a mysterious, invisible air of dread. There is a painterly quality to Qiu’s photographs; they are much more than two-dimensional compositions of harmony and light. They are striking, layered, complex, and jarring. In Cherry Blossoms (2012), an elegantly attired female figure, a spray of cherry blossoms in the foreground, stands in front of four hanging animal carcasses, as if in a butcher shop or meat locker. She confronts us, nonplussed, as if this scene were nothing out of the ordinary. Qiu alternates between the intense saturated colors of her manipulated settings, to austere compositions, verging on grey tones. The Nymph of the River Luo, Winter, (2014), is the last of four parts, one for each season. The setting is a snowy white landscape with mountains in the background. A male figure, only head and torso visible, lies in the foreground. In this cold landscape, the figure is dressed merely in a white tank top and a military cap. He gazes outward, appearing hopeless, as if this were an ending. The Nymph of the River Luo; Autumn, (2014), also portrays a nude male figure. He is draped with cloth, alone in a forest setting; in the foreground is a still life with grapes and flowers. A toppled Buddha’s head suggests a deposed deity or ruler. The scene is intensely decorative, and vaguely Rococo. Mei Xian Qiu, Hollywoodland, 2010. Archival pigment print on plexiglass, 36 x 21 inches. Courtesy of the artist. This exhibit is an offshoot of Qiu’s previous series, Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom — her portrayal of a futuristic Chinese takeover of the United States. In that series the artist used props, costumes and paraphernalia from a Beijing photography studio specializing in staging photo sessions for tourists seeking to re-enact propaganda imagery from the cultural revolution. Some of the images from the earlier series are included in the Qilin exhibition, such as Hollywoodland, (2010). Here, a young soldier in back view, his fist raised in salute, stands on a precipice overlooking the Hollywood sign. The figure is superimposed on the landscape; the word is Hollywood stencil-cut out of the print, mounted on plexiglass, so the letters are filled in by the white of the wall behind. The sky and hills are tinged with rose, as at sunset or dawn. A conqueror, the boy surveys his conquest. Artfully staged, and orchestrated with calculated intent, on the surface, Qiu’s images are resplendent with color and light. Beneath that layer the throughline of Qiu’s narrative discourse is both intentionally disturbing and consistently engaging. It is this contrast of visionary beauty and troubling subject matter combined that endows her work with such profound and indelible impact. While the concept of the Qilin as a symbol of change may be imbued in these images, instead of foretelling good luck or fortune they seem to portend doom. In Qilin, Qiu conveys an underlying sense of conflict steeped in a tea of fatalism. It seems as if her subjects — and perhaps she herself — are resigned to accept the strange world they find themselves inhabiting. After living in Indonesia, Europe, and the US, and in the course of her travels to China, Qiu has embarked on a metaphorical journey as well, to seek a sense of her own truth, arriving at this vibrant, perplexing frontier of her own invention. Mei Xian Qiu, Here is the Deepest Secret that Nobody Knows, 2013. Archival pigment print on plexiglass/light box, 24 x 24.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Mei Xian Qiu, The Lovers 2012. Archival print on plexiglass, 40 X 40 inches. Courtesy of the artist

Megan Abrahams is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist. She studied fine art in Canada and France and has two journalism degrees. A contributing writer for WhiteHot Magazine since 2009, she also writes for Artpulse Magazine. The former editor of a British Columbia newspaper, her articles have appeared in a number of publications. She is currently writing her first novel.

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Mei Xian Qiu at Kopeikin, the Musings of Rene DeLoffre

My friendship with artist Mei Xian Qiu, a third generation Chinese native of Java, has provided an opportunity to observe her visual explorations in a variety of media, including painting and sculpture, over a number of years.  It’s not surprising that she has transferred her unique ideas to photography, for which she is now receiving international recognition. Mei is currently showing her photographic works at the Kopeikin Gallery in Culver City.  Her title for this exhibition, “Qilin,” refers to a mythical Chinese creature whose innate hybridism and duality made him a compass to the west and even a fitting metaphor for the artist herself. Mei’s situation is remarkably akin to that of sculptor Isamu Noguchi, an artist who also straddled East (Japan) and West. There’s little doubt that a heritage of two or more cultures reflects the complexity in her work; a personal synthesis of multi-cultures produce a montage, which contributes to the ever-expanding global monoculture.

Mei Xian Qiu  “Nymph of the River Luo (summer panel

An understanding of such an artist’s bi-cultural experience goes far in deciphering her art, so I recently sat down with her to discuss three specific photographs to discover their cause and effect: Rene De Loffre: One of the photographs that fascinated me was your “Nymph of the River Luo (summer panel)”, a benign-appearing work unless you take a close look.  Here’s a delightfully cute girl holding a large chunk of raw meat as she looks warily off-scene, while a flock of vultures lurk among rocks and trees in the background. Once past the initial double take of the image, the interpretive scenarios become immensely open ended. Strangely more intriguing than ghoulish, one asks how much tongue-in-cheek or satire is in this piece? Mei Xien Qiu: Well there is quite a bit of serious humor in the work.  If you think you understand the symbolism of the work, then there is better jest somewhere close by.  “Summer” is one of a series of 4 panels, a hybrid of “Guernica” and a classic Chinese poem called “The Nymph of the Luo River.”  “Guernica,” a plea for peace, and the “Nymph,” a romantic poem about irreconcilable differences, are rife with symbols and notions of universal truths. Caozhi, the poet, suffers for a woman he can never have, and Picasso amply portrays the suffering of the citizens of Guernica from brutality and darkness.  In the four panels, there are elements of both works, the Nymph’s use of water, doomed romance, ribbons of the deities, magical animals and dreamscapes, and Guernica’s references to war, brutality, symbolic animals, and the coming onslaught.  In the Summer panel, a young child feeds raw meat to scavengers, but where is the original death that the vultures came for?

Mei Xian Qiu  “Nymph of the River Luo (autumn panel)”

R.D.L.: Let’s move on to another photograph, your “The Nymph of the River Luo (Autumn panel)” showing a Bacchanalian youth sitting as if he’s in a Herculaneum triclinium surrounded by a plethora of fruits, and other detritus full of symbolism which you unify as successfully as the “busy field” paintings of Jerome Witkin and photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin currently showing at the Jack Rutberg Gallery. How do you manage to keep the gestalt going? M.X.Q.: Gestalt refers to something that is made of many parts and yet is somehow more than or different from the combination of its parts.  In the Autumn panel, the various objects, the fallen Buddha head, the machine guns, the hour glass, prayer books, military uniforms, the bounty of the fruit, and so on, are different components of a whole person, such as the man in the image, or of a society.   The panels read like a Chinese scroll painting, denoting separations of time or seasons.  There is a cyclical component to them.  The death in the Winter panel enables the life in the Summer panel, and the beginning of youth.  Youth comes of age in the Fall panel, is tested, and loves in the Spring.

Mei Xian Qiu  “Nymph of the River Luo (spring panel)”

R.D.L.:  I’m certain there isn’t a viewer who isn’t struck one way or the other by your straight out seductive photograph “The Nymph of the River Luo (Spring panel)” that shows two woman approaching an embrace.  Between the floral patterned dresses blending into the floral surrounding, you’ve created quite an impressionistic outpouring that engulfs the viewer in a feminine sea of pinks and yellows. Both women ought to be fully dissolved in this sort of environment, yet one female is disengaged from her highly intent partner by looking at the viewer with that same wry expression as the girl holding the meat in your other photograph. One seeming to say, “should I throw it to the vultures so they’ll get their reward?” while this seated woman could well be thinking,  “do I really want to do this and turn this into passion?” Is this all about being conflicted, fearful of irrevocable commitments? M.X.Q.: While life is full of conflicted, irrevocable commitments, the Spring panel deals with the conflict, and hence the tension, in stretching a moment to the infinite (and realizing its futility), and the irrevocability of time.   The woman’s expression, as in the young girl, oscillates, as Friedrich Schlegel puts it, between “enthusiasm and irony.”  In the Spring (love) panel, the women are presented like a gift.  The ribbons (denoting deity and immortality) are earthly and crumpled, not floating in graceful arcs as in the inspired classical paintings of the original Nymph poem.  One of the women is facing the viewer, forcing him or her to be part of the interaction.  The viewer is part and parcel of the tryst, or the presumption of one.  The image is as much about the expectation of the feminine amplified, as about any arcane symbology provided. R.D.L.: How long will your show be up at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery? M.X.Q.: The exhibit ends on April 19 so there’s still a little time left to see it.

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Qiu’s work has a cinematic feel, created by imprinting photographs on plexiglass substrates with thick layers of pigments housed in tabloid souvenir boxes, which have a 3-D quality. (March 1-April 19, 2014)

The Nymph of the River Luo; Summer, photograph on Plexiglass substrate, 2014. Courtesy: Paul Kopeiken Gallery. The utopic surfaces of Mei Xian Qiu’s painterly photographic constructions of idyllic scenes are undercut by disturbing symbolism – which subverts the impact of pictorial conventions and dominant media imagery which dictate perceptions of cultural and gender identities. The diasporic status of  the “other”  trapped by contradictory cultural projections, is both theoretically and personally problematic for Qiu – who grew up in Java, from a third generation Chinese family that moved back and forth to America during her childhood. The impetus for this exhibition comes from a Chinese poem “Let a thousand flowers bloom. A hundred schools of thought contend ” quoted by Mao in a 1957 proclamation that urged artists and academics to come out of hiding, so that a great culture could flower.  Qiu’s photographs explore the hidden dangers in this suggestion, which were put aside momentarily in the romance of this beautiful idea. She elaborately stages her models – Chinese-American and Pan -Asian artists and academics she knows personally – in scenes that draw heavily on symbolism drawn from Western and Chinese art history, poetry, and propogandist media. Her subjects are tenderly portrayed as sacrificial victims for questionable ideals, bought to slaughter for a revolution, or war, or oppressive post-colonial ideology. Qiu’s work has a cinematic feel, created by imprinting photographs on plexiglass substrates with thick layers of pigments housed in tabloid souvenir boxes, which have a 3-D quality. She combines stained glass, to create different angles that change light – recalling the role of stained glass in religious storytelling – to signify the intermingling of contradictory beliefs, in post-colonial culture. A series in four parts that recalls a Chinese scroll painting, “The Nymph of the River Luo” – in summer, fall, winter and spring – is based on a classic Chinese poem about the tragic love between a water nymph and a human prince who could never be together, because “men and gods must go their separate ways” –  which inspired Chinese dream painting. The recurrent imagery of  young women with raw meat and carcasses is a shocking contrast to the profusion of cherry blossoms in her work – which are Chinese symbols of beauty, femininity and peace. Innocent, effeminate  soldiers are depicted surrounded by feminine flowers instead of guns. A soldier in a Chinese military uniform staged to  re-enact  souvenir propoganda imagery, has a red flower in his mouth symbolizing peace – but also suggesting a wound- in an anti-violence protest. In “This way to Paradise”  a young soldier is dog tagged and depicted as a sacrificial virgin floating in water surrounded by flowers, like Ophelia. By transposing traditional gender symbolism in surprising ways, Qiu reflects post-feminist shifts in critical discourse on identity, without being overly-conceptual – because she constantly  searchs for fresh ways to experiment with aesthetic overlaps between photography and painting. This Way to Paradise, photograph on Plexiglass substrate, 2014. Courtesy: Paul Kopeiken Gallery.

By Lita Barrie

Lita Barrie is a Los Angeles based art critic and essayist. She is a cover story writer and Art Muse blogger for Artweek.LA and these essays are selectively aggregated and featured in Painters Table. She is from New Zealand where she wrote a weekly art column for The National Business Review in the late 1980s and contributed to The Listener, Art New Zealand, Antic, AGMANZ, Sites, and Landfall and  also wrote NZ artist catalogues  from 1985 to 2001. In 1990 she relocated to L.A after six months in Europe on a travel grant and  became the L.A correspondent for Artspace, a contributing editor for Artweek and contributed to Art Issues, Visions, and Vernacular. She is the author of numerous museum and art gallery artist catalogue essays ( in LA and NZ). In New Zealand she was awarded four Queen Elizabeth 11 Arts Council grants and a Harkness grant. In Los Angeles, she has taught at:Art Center, Claremont Graduate University,  Otis School of Art and Design, Scripps Women’s College and California State University of Los Angeles. Her post-graduate degrees are in  aesthetic philosophy. She recently left university teaching to focus on writing.

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Vol. 147 December 23/30, 2013 Double – Print the December 23/30, 2013 Double Issue
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December 23/30, 2013 Double, Features
MOCA’s Mizer-Finland Show and the Search for a New LGBT Visual Aesthetic

By Phil Tarley Tue, Dec 10, 2013

The current Bob Miser/Tom of Finland exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) presents a bountiful body of gay male erotica from mid-last century.
MOCA’s Mizer-Finland Show and the Search for a New LGBT Visual Aesthetic

Years ago brown paper bagged portraits of male nudes moved out from porn shops into art galleries, but this is the first time an American museum has mounted a show that shows men mounting each other.

Mizer and Finland zapped the zeitgeist of their time. They were two of the most significant figures of twentieth century erotica and forefathers of an emergent post-war gay culture. But what about today? How do we first define, then design a LGBT paradigm for a new pictorial era? In 2013 women, transgender people and other minorities compel visibility and depiction.

I can’t resist the obvious; it’s enough to say that the MOCA hang is very well-hung. It’s daring, provocative and has a fun and fierce intensity, but is it contemporary? Mizer-Finland work lends a rich legacy and contextualization to gay iconography from, the before. But it leaves me wanting, the after, the now.

S.R. Sharp, vice president of the Tom of Finland board of directors told me that the art still has heat and stays current. “Maybe at first glance the exhibition seems campy or historical but though it represents a time gone by it stands up as timeless. It has an endearing and an enduring quality. Bob (Mizer) and Tom (of Finland) were combating a society where homos did not have it easy. They were forced into dark shadows; they were cowering in back alleys.”

All true. Back then to be out was to be an outlaw. MOCA’S exhibition gives the genre a curatorial cachet and establishment visibility. And so as underground, outsider art rises up, it moves inside, museums.

“There are always people on the margins making art who want to stay underground and be alternative, “said Sally Baxter, a mixed media artist and art editor for Suspend magazine. “It’s important not to shy away from the fact that what makes people queer is that they have queer sex. That’s what makes us gay and I want to see it.”

David Fahey a pioneering Los Angeles gallerist who brought the world Herb Ritts told me that showing male nudes is not much different than showing female nudes. “After Mapplethorpe, male nudity was embraced by the mainstream, I’m happy to see that it’s pretty commonplace today,” Fahey said.

“While gay men had hyper-masculine images to drool over, lesbians always saw themselves depicted as bad girls on the covers of drug store pulp fiction novels, vampires or terrifying prison guards — straight male fantasy images, ” said Karen Ocamb, news editor for Frontiers magazine. “That’s why so many of us preferred the world of the imagination – flowers by Georgia O’Keefe or ‘The Dinner Party’ by Judy Chicago or Zena the Warrior Princess on TV.

Tom of Finland and Bob Mizer created a culture of imagery that changed the way gay men saw themselves. Theirs was a world that preceded Will and Grace, gay marriage and commonplace sexual reassignment surgery.

I left MOCA’s exhibition, thinking about Round Hole, Square Peg, a show Paul Bridgewater originated at Smart Clothes, his downtown, New York City gallery. It sought a new LGBT visual brand. Bridgewater wrote a manifesto:

Queer identity is not simply a sexual one. Queer artists have a perspective and an experience to contribute to society that is wholly their own and it’s a rich, and worldly one. Having been marginalized and alienated for so long has developed a unique view of self worth, self image, spiritually and companionship.

A hunt for new archetypes has become a preoccupation. Stephen Cohen, whose Los Angeles photography gallery exhibited Zackary Drucker’s transsexual photography, Anthony Friedkin’s “Gay Essays” and Bruce of L.A., warmly supported the idea for a show. Cohen felt that, “The search for a new template that includes the many shades of LGBT life today vs. the old stereotypes is long overdue.” And so I am working on a show for the Artist’s Corner Gallery which will be the first LGBT exhibition at photo l.a., one of the oldest fine art fairs in the country. It will feature a special invitational, Wall of Fame to hang next to the juried exhibition.

Mei Xian Qui, The Lovers, Courtesy of The Paul Kopeikin Gallery

Round Hole, Square Peg opens at photo l.a. on January 16, 2014. For information and to submit photographic work for juried selection visit artistscorner.us.
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Mei Xian Qiu: Qilin by Aline Smithson          April 9, 2014

Mei Xian Qiu is a Los Angeles based artist who creates staged tableaux that reflect Cultural Revolution Propaganda imagery.  She currently has an exhibition at the Kopeikin Gallery ending on April 19th. “In the photographs, hidden political dangers are suggested and must be addressed urgently, but are put aside momentarily, subsumed to the romance of “the beautiful idea.” Mei’s models are Pan Asian American artists, and academics specializing in Chinese culture–the very group at risk in a Hundred Flowers Movement. She uses discarded U.S. military uniforms andcheongsams constructed for the photographs, and Chinese mock ups taken from a Beijing photography studio.” Mei was born in the town of Pekalongan, on the island of Java, Indonesia, to a third generation Chinese minority family. At birth, she was given various names in preparation for societal collapse and variant potential futures, a Chinese name, an American name and an Indonesian name given by her parents, as well as a Catholic name by the local priest. In the aftermath of the Chinese and Communist genocide, the family immigrated to the United States. She was moved back and forth several times between the two countries during her childhood – her parents initial reaction to what they perceived as the amorality of life in the West countered with the uncertainty of life in Java. Partially as a result of a growing sense of restlessness, her father joined the U.S. Air force and the family lived across the country, sometimes staying in one place for just a month at a time. She has also been based in Europe, China, and Indonesia as an adult. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe and her work has been featured at many art fairs. Qilin is a series of photographs portraying a Chinese takeover of the United States, is a popular partial Western misquotation of Mao Zedong’s “Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend.” Taken from classical Chinese poetry, Mao used this slogan to proclaim a great society where 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. Growing up in Java as a third generation Chinese Diasporic minority during a time when being Chinese was unlawful, Qiu reconstructed the unknown, fantastical notions of culture, self invented and — by dissecting essential archetypes, revelatory and iconic. This type of flexible self view and easy piercings of notions of the impermeable interior self, is in keeping with the new contemporary landscape of commonplace transience and a growing global mono culture. After her family immigrated to the U.S. in response to genocide, Qiu visited China five times only to learn it was eagerly shedding its own past culture viewed as outdated in order to embrace modernity. The photographs uses familiar symbolism and historical dystopianism, but looks squarely to the future. Never forgetful of the past, this body of work engages the constitution of the future, affirmatively critical, specifically with respect to globalism, the identity of the self and self view, the social landscape, post-colonialism, and that of the larger national body politic.

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Interview with Chinese, American, and Indonesian fine art photographer Mei Xian Qiu

Mei Xian Qiu is a Chinese, American, and Indonesian fine art photographer whose current series, Qilin, is showing at the Koeipkin Gallery in Los Angeles through April 19, 2014.  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. How old were you when you moved to the United States, and how has being Chinese and American informed your art?I moved to the U.S when I was four to escape persecution in Indonesia.  My family lived in Indonesia for three generations, since the 1880’s.  Coming from a very conservative country, my parents wanted to frame their lives differently.  Although they felt a certain exultation from this new freedom, they perceived the U.S. as an amoral place and not a place to raise children.Hence, they gave all their children away, and I was sent back to Indonesia.  My mother separated from my father and decided she wanted her family back.  She and my father began the difficult process of reclaiming their four children.  Since that time, I have moved back and forth several times.Inter-culturalism is interesting and often complex.  My work stems directly from being Chinese, American, and Indonesian.  My view of Chinese culture is necessarily fantastical, because I grew up where being Chinese was illegal and we had no access to Chinese culture in terms of traditions or morays.  At the same time, we were labeled as Chinese and persecuted. In my work, I try to create a “Chinese” history in self-reinventions — skewed and out of whack, and completely unrestricted.My main cultural identity has been American and Los Angelino, with a view towards the East like something out of a dream.  My work is clearly American (as opposed to Chinese), especially in the way the subjects challenge the viewer with the directness of their gaze. When did you become an artist, and how did photography start to play a role in that? Probably from my mother’s belly! My caretakers would ask me to stop drawing and go outside to play with my friends. My life history posed  questions that I had to tackle in an open handed way. Photography was an outgrowth of painting.  It is an ideal medium for me because photographs bombard an average 21st century human on a daily basis, combining commercial and political propaganda with images of personal and societal history.  I find this daily merging of fiction and reality interesting.  I want my work to have that illusion and connection to reality. How do you like living in Los Angeles? What are the pros and cons, and is there somewhere else you would like to be? Perhaps it’s the connection to cinema, but from when I arrived in Los Angeles at sixteen, I felt this freedom — this relative tolerance of differences, ideas, and exploration.  It took me a few years to get accustomed to the landscape, the colors and the even the architecture, but I’ve now acquired a deep appreciation for these characteristics. I would like to be in a lot of places.  I miss Indonesia for instance, but am unsure if what I miss still exists. Your newest series Qilin and Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom have a lot of deep and diverse things going on. Can you distill for the layman what you are trying to say? A simple distillation would be that the work presents an eroticized Rorschach to view our shifting perceptions, which are impermeable and unchanging. We live in an internal self-imposed landscape of an increasingly global monoculture.  Who are we and what will we become, as seemingly indigenous cultural origins become more and more attenuated?  Does our view of ourselves start to resemble how others view us at its most trite, streamlined and iconic? A Qilin  (Qi–male, lin–female) is an amalgamated Chinese creature, a hybrid of real and imaginary beings, and an ancient compass to the West.  It pushes the work of Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom to its most dualistic, hybridist components. In the image Cherry Blossoms from this series, there is a woman beautifully dressed in front of slaughtered animals. What is the meaning of this? Did you photograph the animals or have them imported into the shot? To understand this image, it is useful to look at the general outlines of the series Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom.  Mao Zedong quoted a classic Chinese poem, “Let a hundred flowers bloom.  Let a hundred schools of thought contend.” In a great society, different points of view and free expression should prevail.  As a result, intellectuals and artists came out of hiding, living for this “beautiful idea,” even though they must have known it would be ultimately fatalistic, by creating a utopian kernel inside a dystopian vision. The photographs portray a mock annexation of the U.S. by the Chinese, creating a hundred flowers movement here. The actors in the photographs are American artists or academics specializing in Chinese history — the very group targeted in the hundred flowers movement.  The Chinese uniforms come from a Beijing photo studio where cultural revolution imagery is re-enacted by foreign tourists. The uniforms are brought home as souvenirs. In this particular image, the woman is wearing a classical Chinese dress called a qipao, considered outmoded and “anti-modern,” in contemporary China, where Western pop culture and fashion are wholeheartedly embraced.  She is holding cherry blossoms, a symbol of feminine domestic power and the dominance of beauty. In image 8990,  you have two gay soldiers, one Chinese and the other American, embracing in front of a deer in the forest.  What is the symbolism here and did you use stock imagery for this background? If soldiers were countries, what would they do?  That was my initial question, since soldiers were sometimes the only contact one country had with another. Countries courted, fought, and got into bed with one another.  I used two male soldiers because I did not want gender roles to be part of what the image was about, and I found it made sense formally as well. In terms of the symbolism of the deer, they were associated with high remuneration and often historically depicted in Chinese art with government officials.  I did not use stock imagery for the background. It is a bit of a play upon a play, with a slight dig at Chinese contemporary art — its political, moral, and aesthetic censorship, while its artists deal with issues such as control, war, and Western influence. Image 8801 has a scantily clad woman in front of a poster of AK-47’s. Are you trying to juxtapose sexiness with war? My work is most often highly subversive, dealing with popular iconography, stereotypes, and persistent viewpoints of gender and culture.  War is ultimately about power. We have always been surrounded by stories in one form or another of sex, conflict and dominance—and the prestige that goes with it—that we use to define ourselves. If the function of an artist is to be a trickster of sorts, then we break down these stories and reconstruct them. In this photograph, what has been made to be significant and what has been diminutized?  In the lower right hand corner of the picture, there is a scattering of Chairman Mao badges that were once ubiquitous during the Cultural Revolution. Now they have been regurgitated as tourist souvenirs at countless Chinatowns around the world. Many of them have Mao’s 1962 poem written on them; “The plum blossom is delighted. The sky is full of snow.” You are using the Plexiglas process for your prints. How did you learn about this, and what are the advantages? My background is as a painter, and my photographs are quite painterly, with heavy layers of velvety pigment. The Plexiglas boxes were made to resemble a cross between three dimensional souvenir boxes and a reverential sort of stained glass.  When I was a child growing up in post colonial Java, I would be woken at 5:00 a.m. to walk for an hour to the only Western style building in the village, a small cathedral (we had been converted from Buddhism by missionaries).  At 6:00 a.m. every Sunday, the equatorial light would shine brilliantly through the stained glass and play upon the dust motes in the air. To me, it held the magic and promise of the West.  The variables of light through an image are important in my work, as they are a metaphor for the shades of identity and the multi-dimensionality of truth. How was the experience at Art Basel? What happened and what did you learn? I learned that the art world is small.  You would consistently meet friends from different parts of the world at the fairs. What do you want to achieve in the future, and are you working on a new series yet?   I would like to add sculptural and installation components.  I want to keep working on my series, and follow it through its natural progression.

– See more at: http://www.kenweingart.com/blog/interview-chinese-american-indonesian-fine-art-photographer-mei-xian-qiu/#sthash.2g6ceq7U.dpuf

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March 18. 2014

Mei Xian Qiu is a Los Angeles based artist. She is of a third generation Chinese family and eventually emigrated to America in light of Chinese and Communist genocide. Her father was in the U.S. Air Force and she seemed to grow up all over the world, getting influences from every place she lived. Her photographic work deals with the convergence of Western and Eastern cultures, taking Communist characters and colliding them with taboo or decidedly edgy activities. The work alludes to an alternate dystopian future where both mindsets have melted together in the most fascinating ways possible.  

Qui’s work features men and women dressed in traditional Chinese wears, most notably Communist uniforms and era specific outfits. They’re often juxtaposed against American landmarks or are placed with someone of the same gender, sometimes embracing. There is a feeling of a Communist takeover of America—but it didn’t go as well as planned. Instead of retaining a specific idea of ownership, the resulting world is trapped in youthful play and homoerotic sexual exploration. Communism is used as a folly, a metaphor for an unsophisticated and under-developed thought process. Qui’s placing her characters in the guise of Chinese Communists and putting them in these otherwise compromising scenes removes the power of their image. It’s a powerful effect. The body of work is called Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom and is executed so beautifully. The work is reminiscent of propaganda and softcore romance novels. You can even see classic art referenced, recalling that of Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses sœurs and more. The works are born out of fantasy and certainly retain a dream-like quality. If interested, you can catch Qiu’s work on view at Kopeikin through April 19: learn more about that here.

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Photos from Reception at Kopeikin Gallery March 1, 2014

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Interview for 2013 Paci Contemporary Exhibit:

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Artist Pension Trust (APT)  Interview:

Links:

http://www.aptglobal.org/en/About/PressRoom/Article/40973

http://www.aptglobal.org/en/Page/APT-Global-Newsletter/

Artist Spotlight on Mei Xian Qui                                                    02/06/2014

Name: Mei Xian Qiu

Where I live: Los Angeles

My greatest inspiration: The village I grew up in central Java -- the sights, sounds, stories, the feel of its heat, dust, wetness, the village fires, the density of the jungle, the culture of batik, the little intrigues, its little macrocosm of the world. 

My hero: My father

My most treasured possession: My mind

My favorite thing to do:  Leaping tall buildings in a single bound

My favorite words to live by: Sit still

My proudest moment or my greatest achievement: Smiling with black teeth as a small child

The best advice I received:  Marina Abromovic:  “To know whether or not you are an artist is like breathing.  You just breathe, or else you have to die.”

The best advice I ever gave:  Take the next step.  Don’t be afraid of the story you have to tell.

I joined APT because: I have a tremendous respect for its artists and am wowed by its concept

Currently working on: Solo show for Kopeikin Gallery and an exhibit in Sao Paolo

Currently exploring issues of: Self invented identities in an increasingly global mono culture

What I love most about creating art/ being an artist: The freedom to follow an idea to its conclusion

I create art where I feel: Safe

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December 23/30, 2013 Double, Features

The current Bob Miser/Tom of Finland exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) presents a bountiful body of gay male erotica from mid-last century.

Years ago brown paper bagged portraits of male nudes moved out from porn shops into art galleries, but this is the first time an American museum has mounted a show that shows men mounting each other. Mizer and Finland zapped the zeitgeist of their time. They were two of the most significant figures of twentieth century erotica and forefathers of an emergent post-war gay culture. But what about today? How do we first define, then design a LGBT paradigm for a new pictorial era? In 2013 women, transgender people and other minorities compel visibility and depiction. I can’t resist the obvious; it’s enough to say that the MOCA hang is very well-hung. It’s daring, provocative and has a fun and fierce intensity, but is it contemporary? Mizer-Finland work lends a rich legacy and contextualization to gay iconography from, the before. But it leaves me wanting, the after, the now. S.R. Sharp, vice president of the Tom of Finland board of directors told me that the art still has heat and stays current. “Maybe at first glance the exhibition seems campy or historical but though it represents a time gone by it stands up as timeless. It has an endearing and an enduring quality. Bob (Mizer) and Tom (of Finland) were combating a society where homos did not have it easy.  They were forced into dark shadows; they were cowering in back alleys.” All true. Back then to be out was to be an outlaw. MOCA’S exhibition gives the genre a curatorial cachet and establishment visibility. And so as underground, outsider art rises up, it moves inside, museums. “There are always  people on the margins making art who want to stay underground and be alternative, “said  Sally Baxter, a mixed media artist and art editor for Suspend magazine. “It’s important not to shy away from the fact that what makes people queer is that they have queer sex. That’s what makes us gay and I want to see it.” David Fahey a pioneering Los Angeles gallerist who brought the world Herb Ritts told me that showing male nudes is not much different than showing female nudes. “After Mapplethorpe, male nudity was embraced by the mainstream, I’m happy to see that it’s pretty commonplace today,” Fahey said. “While gay men had hyper-masculine images to drool over, lesbians always saw themselves depicted as bad girls on the covers of drug store pulp fiction novels, vampires or terrifying prison guards — straight male fantasy images, ” said Karen Ocamb, news editor for Frontiers magazine. “That’s why so many of us preferred the world of the imagination – flowers by Georgia O’Keefe or ‘The Dinner Party’ by Judy Chicago or Zena the Warrior Princess on TV. Tom of Finland and Bob Mizer created a culture of imagery that changed the way gay men saw themselves. Theirs was a world that preceded Will and Grace, gay marriage and commonplace sexual reassignment surgery. I left MOCA’s exhibition, thinking about Round Hole, Square Peg, a show Paul Bridgewater originated at Smart Clothes, his downtown, New York City gallery. It sought a new LGBT visual brand. Bridgewater wrote a manifesto: Queer identity is not simply a sexual one. Queer artists have a perspective and an experience to contribute to society that is wholly their own and it’s a rich, and worldly one. Having been marginalized and alienated for so long has developed a unique view of self worth, self image, spiritually and companionship. A hunt for new archetypes has become a preoccupation. Stephen Cohen, whose Los Angeles photography gallery exhibited Zackary Drucker’s transsexual photography, Anthony Friedkin’s “Gay Essays” and Bruce of L.A., warmly supported the idea for a show. Cohen felt that, “The search for a new template that includes the many shades of LGBT life today vs. the old stereotypes is long overdue.” And so I am working on a show for the Artist’s Corner Gallery which will be the first LGBT exhibition at photo l.a., one of the oldest fine art fairs in the country. It will feature a special invitational, Wall of Fame to hang next to the juried exhibition. Mei Xian Qui, The Lovers, Courtesy of The Paul Kopeikin Gallery Round Hole, Square Peg opens at photo l.a. on January 16, 2014.  For information and to submit photographic work for juried selection visit artistscorner.us.

—————————————————————————————————————————— FABRIK ART DESIGN ARCHITECTURE.  12.2013

Round Hole, Square Peg: A New LGBT Visual Aesthetic For Century 21

Tom Of Finland’s Cover Drawing on Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial Magazine The Bob Mizer-Tom of Finland exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) presents a bountiful body of gay male erotica from mid-last century. Years ago brown paper bagged portraits of male nudes moved out from porn shops into art galleries, but this is the first time an American Museum has mounted a show that shows men mounting each other. Mizer and Finland zapped the zeitgeist of their time. They were two of the most significant figures of twentieth century erotica and forefathers of an emergent post-war gay culture. But what about today?  How do we first define, then design a LGBT paradigm for a new pictorial era?   In 2013, women, transgender people and other minorities compel visibility and depiction. I can’t resist the obvious; it’s enough to say that the MOCA hang is very well-hung.  It’s daring, provocative and has a fun and fierce intensity, but is it contemporary? Mizer-Finland work lends a rich legacy and contextualization to gay iconography from, the before. But it leaves me wanting, the after, the now. S.R. Sharp, vice president of the Tom of Finland board of directors told me that the art still has heat and stays current. “Maybe at first glance the exhibition seems campy or historical but though it represents a time gone by it stands up as timeless. It has an endearing and an enduring quality. Bob (Mizer) and Tom (of Finland) were combating a society where homos did not have it easy. They were forced into dark shadows; they were cowering in back alleys.”   Photo by Bob Mizer All true. Back then to be out was to be an outlaw. MOCA’s exhibition gives the genre a curatorial cachet and establishment visibility.  And so as underground, outsider art rises up, it moves inside, museums. “There are always people on the margins making art who want to stay underground and be alternative, “said  Sally Baxter, a mixed media artist and art editor for Suspend magazine. “It’s important not to shy away from the fact that what a makes people queer is that they have queer sex. That’s what makes us gay and I want to see it.” David Fahey a pioneering Los Angeles gallerist who brought the world Herb Ritts, told me that that showing male nudes is not much different than showing female nudes. “After Mapplethorpe, male nudity was embraced by the mainstream, I’m happy to see that it’s pretty commonplace today,” Fahey said. “While gay men had hyper-masculine images to drool over, lesbians always saw themselves depicted as bad girls on the covers of drug store pulp fiction novels, vampires or terrifying prison guards – straight male fantasy images, ” said Karen Ocamb, news editor for Frontiers magazine. “That’s why so many of us preferred the world of the imagination – flowers by Georgia O’Keefe or ‘The Dinner Party’ by Judy Chicago or Zena the Warrior Princess on TV.   Mei Xian Qui – The Lovers Courtesy of Paul Kopeikin Gallery Tom of Finland and Bob Mizer created a culture of imagery that changed the way gay men saw themselves. Theirs was a world that preceded Will and Grace, gay marriage and common place sexual reassignment surgery. I left MOCA’s exhibition thinking about Round Hole, Square Peg, a show Paul Bridgewater originated at Smart Clothes, his downtown, New York City gallery. It sought a new LGBT visual Brand. Bridgewater wrote a manifesto: Queer identity is not simply a sexual one. Queer artists have a perspective and an experience to contribute to society that is wholly their own and it’s a rich, and worldly one. Having been  marginalized  and alienated for so long  has developed  a unique  view of self worth, self image, spirituality and companionship. Tom Atwood – Mother Flawles Sabrina From Kings and Queens in Their Castles A hunt for new archetypes has become a preoccupation. Stephen Cohen, whose Los Angeles photography gallery exhibited Zackary Drucker’s transsexual photography, Anthony Friedkin’s “Gay Essays,” and Bruce of L.A., warmly supported the idea for a show. Cohen felt that “The search for a new template that includes the many shades of LGBT life today vs. the old stereotypes is long overdue.” And so I am working on a show for the Artist’s Corner Gallery which will be the first LGBT exhibition at photo l.a., one of the oldest fine art fairs in the country. It will feature a special invitational, Wall of Fame to hang next to a juried  exhibition. Round Hole, Square Peg opens at photo l.a. on January 16, 2014. For information and to submit photographic work for juried selection visit: artistscorner.us ————————————————————————————————————————————-      ______________________________________________________   Artribune, April 1, 2013 Il fulcro generatore della mostra alla Paci Contemporary si concreta nel bozzetto di “uomo-rosa”, metafora tratta da un’antica poesia cinese, ma anche proclama di Mao Tse-Tung (“Che cento fiori fioriscano, che cento scuole gareggino”), allusivo al confronto tra culture e arti. Le diciannove opere di Mei Xian Qiu riflettono in maniera critica su tale messaggio, mettendo in scena un’ideale battaglia non violenta, in un florilegio di petali e nella perfezione formale delle immagini, dettagliate e caratterizzate da tinte sature. Così ne parla il gallerista, Giampaolo Paci: “Ci interessavano fotografie che attingessero anche alla scultura, in quanto il plexiglas sul quale sono impresse fornisce una dimensione di tridimensionalità che proietta sui muri ombre e colori, a seconda del variare della luce del giorno”. Milena Zanotti http://www.artribune.com/2013/03/rosa-fresca-aulentissima-la-cina-di-mei-xian-qiu/ ___________________________________________________

MEI XIAN QIU: CHINA MON AMOUR

By Peter Frank Identity slips and morphs, brutality and delicacy converge in Mei Xian Qiu’s photographic works, optically and technically no less than narratively and imagistically. The presence of these pictures, printed on Plexiglass as if prepared for an ad display in a public passageway, depends as much on their color and texture – their represented formal qualities – as on the people and occasions they depict – their represented prosaic qualities. Nothing is at it seems. And of course, as the Zen koan appends, nor is it otherwise. Mei does not admit the certitude with which identity-based art typically avers its positions – in all likelihood because she does not share such certitude. Her work certainly manifests her life experience, but that experience is one of shifting identity, a single sense of self having to present different selves to different facets of society simultaneously – a multiple otherness in which social, political, religious, and even family allegiances and affinities contrast and conflate, advance and recede, according to exterior forces. Mei  Xian Qiu – a/k/a Suriyani Gunadi, Maria Theresia Gunadi, even Cindy (Cinderella!) Gunadi – grew up ethnic Chinese in central Java, in an enclave of semi-assimilated Sino-Indonesians who lived in constant fear of expulsion or worse. The genocide of 1969, which Mei and her family barely escaped, is a case in point.  The experience parallels that of African-Americans in post-Civil War America, Gypsies throughout Europe, or Jews… well, almost everywhere. The relative proximity of China provided little comfort to these outliers, who were disdained in their ancestral homeland even as they were resented in their adopted home. Living in Los Angeles quiets but does not eradicate Mei’s sense of otherness and displacement, and her sense of alienation now abides uncomfortably, itself alienated from the bland reassurance of the American melting pot. Mei’s work reflects the undercurrent of unmoored unease a multiply-hyphenated individual can never quite escape. But it does so in a way that faces down, even taunts its ghosts. Her photographic series, in their premises – hyped to the point of absurdity – and their depictions – deliriously saturated with sensuous and exotic touches — amplify, distort, and (thus) mock the myriad stereotypes to which Mei herself could be, and sometimes has been, subject. The Orientalist suppositions of the west – the American Old West not least – rise off her pictures like steam. The more acute prejudices of China’s often aggrieved neighbors lend brittleness to Mei’s burlesque exaggerations. And worldwide anxiety about China’s newfound power and prominence rears its ugly head time and again in these sweet-hued satires, absurdly but darkly representing the Chinese people as a new Mongol horde at once militant and decadent, facelessly regimented and lustily polymorphous. Mei Xian Qiu’s photographs, ecstatic comedies of ethnic calamity, follow in an enduring tradition of minority entertainment, less multi-culturated than semi-acculturated. They are equivalent to minstrel shows, Yiddish theater, and norteño songs, making fun of majority misunderstanding and hostility by absorbing and parodying such ignorance. Hers is the China – and Chinese – of the world’s nightmares, a campy skew on and skewering of outlandish, outdated, and/or outsized notions of otherhood. But Mei also works in the wake of Pop art (Chinese as well as American), photographic appropriation, and the continual blandishments of the digital age, allowing – indeed, requiring – her to assume the sometimes seductive, sometimes clamorous voice of popular media. Hence her over-the-top antique touches and latter-day formats, from the grotesque superpositions of China doll and abattoir, Maoist automaton and American landscape, to improbable same-sex encounters among icons of propriety, to the use of Plexi, garish, perverse, and yet starkly handsome and revealing in its own hard and ubiquitous way. This is highly artful art, elegant and calculated, designed to deflate the presumptions of an insensitive world even as it roils in muffled anguish. February 2013 Los Angeles _______________________________________________________________________________________________ ZOOM Magazine article (Fall 2013 Human Rights Issue)   Download printable cover PDF Download printable pages PDF ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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, HOLLYWOOD (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. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ TAGES WOCHE ARTICLE Ping-Pong mal 3 13.06.2012, 18:52Uhr Basel trifft auf Miami: Franziska Furter und Robert Chambers Werk 2 Tage vor der Vernissage. (Bild: Jana Kouril) Mit je vier Künstlern eröffnet «Ping-Pong» heute 18.00 Uhr die Ausstellung im M54 im Kleinbasel. Je vier Künstler sind aus oder von Basel, die anderen vier aus Miami. Schon mehrere Jahre geht das so hin und her über den grossen Teich. Nur mit viel Organisation und Begeisterung laufen die paar Tage rund, wie Sue Irion, selbst Künstlerin und in der Ausstellung vertreten, erklärt. «Ich sage gerne, es ist eine Ausstellung von Künstlern für Künstler», sagt sie. Und so gastieren die Künstler, manchmal die gleichen, manchmal neu hinzugekommene einmal im Jahr hier in Basel und einmal in Miami. Gemeinsam mit Anthony Thomas, Stimme und Gitarrenmann der Basler Garage-Rock-Surf-Band «The Lombego Surfers», hat Irion die Austellung gestemmt. Heute wird Thomas für das im Cüplirausch doch arg vermisste Rock’n’Roll-Feeling sorgen, denn das Trio spielt in Untergeschoss des M54 um ca. 20.00 Uhr. Cheers! Was an diesem Jahrgang des munteren Schlagabtauschs neu ist? Dass vier Künstler aus Los Angeles mit dabei sind und somit auch die «Tour de Art» um die millionenstadt L. A. erweitert wird. Zu sehen sind in Basel mobile Silos aus Norwegen aufgeschichtet von Robert Chambers (Miami) oder leckere Kuchenstücke gemalt von Mette Tommerup und gestickt von Pip Brant, die in surrealistischen Kompositionen schwelgenden Gemälde und eine Altarskulptur von Lex Vögtli (Basel) oder die durchscheinenden, an Leuchtkästen erinnernden Fotografien von Mei Xian Qiu (Los Angeles). Spielerisch sind die verschiedenen Positionen im Raum präsentiert und erfrischend locker zu einem Ganzen gefügt. Und anyway – who gets to call it art? Vernissage 13. Juni 2012, 18.00 Uhr, live The Lombego Surfers und Robert Grave Mittwoch, 13. Juni 2012 – Sonntag, 17. Juni 2012, M54, Mörsbergerstrasse 54, 4057 Basel ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________________________             ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ HYPERALLERGIC ARTICLE A Hundred Flowers Bloom When China Invades by An Xiao on April 26, 2012 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.” 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. The 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”

____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Lenscratch Sunday, October 23, 2010