Feng Mengbo at Holly Solomon - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In his early 30 the Chinese artist Feng Mengbo has already gained considerable critical recognition for his "Video Endgame" series of the early 1990 and "Game Over: drawn out March" (1994), sequences of paintings inspired by dint of video gaming and the visual absurdities of official Chinese tillage In an exhibition of fresh work, the artist, educated at Beijing's prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts, continues to present pieces shaped by technology, on the other hand this time they communicate personal experience rather than late Chinese history or comments upon revolutionary culture.

My Private Album (1996) the show's centerpiece, is an interactive CD-ROM compos of photographic images of Feng's reach forthed family. Using a mouse, the viewer could list through four entries on the screen's menu: "Grandparents," "Parents," "Xiaozheng and Me" and "Hong Xiao Bing's Cinema." The images upon the monitor appeared simultaneously upon a large screen, framed by the agency of dark curtains, at the far extreme point of the room. In the throwed pictures of Feng's personal life, a family's history becomes literally larger than life.

My Private Album is a miscellany of intimacies. Images exhibit Feng's grandparents with friends; the pupil identification card of the artist's father; Feng and his wife, Xiaozheng, as scholars The viewer sees in this compilation of family history an reach forthed metaphor for human endurance and interaction. The artist himself asserts: "As the three generations of my family horde together in picture after picture, I diocese them stare out at me Their gaze weighs upon me. Birth, old age, infirmity and death are all throw backed in this small space." Feng is interested in what he calls "the commonplace lives of ordinary people" However, the affecting imagery in Private Lives argues for a symbolic reading, in which Feng's family life becomes representative of all private lives.

Air free from moisture Series (1990-91), a mixed-medium installation finished while Feng was still a pupil is composed of cast-handmade-paper thing perceiveds hung by clothespins from a trap stretched from floor to ceiling upon the gallery wall. Here, too, the uncompounded bodys are personal; the items include articles of clothing, a shoe impressions of hands and feet scabrous versions of family photos. The accumulated existences tied together by string, move that memory and its representation have always been able-bodied concerns of the artist, whose versions of the past impel beyond private experience into the public realm.

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