雪球大众人

艺术家苗妙在麦勒画廊举办的首次大型个展“雪球大众人”。本次展览试图梳理苗妙近年来的创作，并呈现她是如何巧妙地将从日常中捡拾而来的素材和经验积累并转化或“剪辑”为其独特的绘画语言的。苗妙将这一充满流动性的创作喻为“雪球”，某种程度而言，这也是她对日常的致敬与赞美。

Miao Miao’s (b. 1986) first large-scale solo exhibition Snowmasses held at Galerie Urs Meile. This exhibition sifts through Miao Miao’s creations over recent years, revealing her adept extraction and accumulation of materials and experiences from the everyday, which she transforms or “edits” into a unique painting language. Miao Miao describes this fluid creative action as “snowballs,” which is, in a sense, her way of paying homage to the everyday.

《在水果店》（2023）组画中，那些色彩明艳、形态迥异的水果探讨的是世界地理版图问题，《葬礼》

（2023）是对生命和时间的反思，而《在K的车里》（2023）则展现了对生活的赞美和对日常美好瞬间的珍视。以《在城堡附近》（2023）中抽取的苹果为元素创作的雕塑《船》（2023）则深入探讨了诱惑与选择的主题，通过苹果这一象征性元素开启关于知识、欲望和重大决策之间复杂关系的思考。

The brightly colored fruits of disparate shapes in her latest work In the Fruit Store (2023) are a discussion of issues in world geographics; Funeral (2023) is a reflection on life and time; while In K’s Bus (2023) presents an ode to life and a love song to the beautiful moments of the everyday. An apple extracted from Near the Castle (2023) has been turned into sculpture Boat (2023), in a deep dive into themes of temptation and choice, with the symbolic element of the apple engaging thinking on the complex relationships between desire, strategy, and momentous decisions.

苗妙的画中人常常是没有特定身份、面孔模糊的普通大众。她有意地对这些旅程中偶遇的形象做了简练概括，侧重于对他们身姿和动态的把握，使观者得以深入一种灵动的生活情境中，同时也加入平面化的图像趣味使之略显奇幻。苗妙的艺术实践并没有拘囿于非传统的绘画风格和媒介研究，而是扩展到了更为广泛的领域。对形态和色彩变化的乐此不疲的探索自然而然将苗妙引向了对二维与三维之间转换的尝试。她使用手工纸粘土为塑造材料，并进行着色，试图在抽象观念与具体可感的物质形态之间构建准确、合一的通道。

The people who appear in Miao Miao’s pictures are often common people, masses, lacking specific identity and with unclear faces. She has intentionally simplified and generalized these images encountered on her travels, focusing on grasping their postures and movements, drawing the viewer into a living dynamic, while the trappings of flat graphic style lend them a touch of fantasy. Her artistic practice is not limited to non-traditional painting styles and medium research, but has expanded into broader territory. Her tireless exploration of form and color has naturally drawn Miao Miao to experiment in transformations between two and three dimensions. She uses handmade paper clay as a sculptural material, which she then colors in an attempt to establish a precise, unified channel linking abstract concepts and concrete, tangible material forms.

尽管苗妙构建的画面中总是蕴含着耐人揣摩和忍俊不禁的叙事性和文学性，但是对于形状和颜色的探索一直以来都是苗妙绘画创作的基础。对苗妙而言，重要的不仅是她所绘之物，而是绘画过程本身。苗妙捡拾了日常生活所充斥的大量符号化与标识化，其中包括各种鼓胀的脑袋、臀部、水果、足球、雪团等这些取自于日常并从头脑中孕育出来的形态和意念。而“雪球”一词，作为苗妙自我提炼出的概念化模型，也指向了这一形态，并且简约地囊括了它们飘落、凝结与消融的过程，就像外部世界瞬息万变的表象一样，虽然不可永恒，但正是在固态与液态的有机转化中呈现出生机。

Though the pictures Miao Miao constructs always contain thought-provoking and tantalizing narrative and literary elements, the real keystone of Miao Miao’s painting has always been the exploration of shape and color. For Miao Miao, what matters isn’t just what she paints, but the process of painting itself. Miao Miao has picked up the various iconified, often swelling forms that permeate everyday life—heads, posteriors, fruits, footballs, snowballs, and other forms and notions pulled from the everyday and further fostered into being in her mind. The term “snowball” is a conceptual model of Miao Miao’s self-refinement. It also refers to this form, and a simple catch-all term for the process of falling, condensation and melting. Like the constantly-shifting appearance of the outer world, it may not last forever, but this very process of organic transformation between solid and liquid reveals its vitality.

苗妙的画作有很大一部分脱胎于速写或者手机快照，对沿途风景的捕捉、观察和附着其上的想象力，是她制作雪球世界的源泉，换句话说，对转瞬即逝的外部世界进行图像化处理使苗妙深深着迷。通过绘画这一媒介，苗妙将其捕捉的日常碎片进行蒙太奇式的“剪辑”，重建她对于时间和空间的感知。

Most of Miao Miao’s paintings emerge from sketches or mobile phone snapshots. Her capturing and observation of the landscape along her travel routes, and the imagination she attaches to it, are the wellspring behind the snowball world she builds. In other words, Miao Miao is engrossed by the act of graphically rendering the ephemeral world. Through the medium of painting, Miao Miao takes her captured fragments of the everyday and subjects them to montage-style compilation, reconstructing her perceptions of time and space.

展览中的每一件作品如同一颗颗由日常观察与体验凝结的雪球，灵动而变幻。观者仿佛被邀请步入了一个由五彩缤纷的日常碎片汇聚而成的视觉万花筒。而在令人愉悦的视觉背后，是艺术家严苛的绘画实践和勃勃的野心，尝试从剧烈变动的日常中找到多样的普通人和生活图像，并用奇思妙想来激活它，找到其中蕴藏的活力，可能也是雪球世界应有的一个核心。

Every work in the exhibition is like a snowball that has coalesced from everyday observations and experiences, vivid and dynamic. It is as if the viewer has been invited to step into a visual kaleidoscope made from a riotous profusion of colorful fragments of the everyday. Behind the pleasing visuals are the artist’s rigorous painting practice and fierce ambition as she attempts, within the rapid fluctuations of the everyday, to find diverse images of common people and life, to use fantastical thinking to activate them, and find the vitality within, that core that should be at the heart of the snowball world.