Path and Adventure

Collateral Event of the 56th International Art Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia

The Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau (IACM), Macao Museum of Art (MAM) together with the Cultural Affairs Bureau (ICM) of the Macao S.A.R. Government, is pleased to present ‘Path and Adventure – Works by Mio Pang Fei’, exhibition from Macao, China at the 56th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition will be inaugurated at 5:30p.m. on May 7th and runs until November 22th in 2015.

The ‘Path and Adventure’ is a narrative of a Chinese painter, who decided to take on an adventure and explore the future of oriental painting during the Cultural Revolution, and then destined to be tormented, physically and mentally, on his secret and devout quest and experiments, confronting inner doubts and facing grave personal risks of demise in his artistic pursuit overriding of the dominant Maoist ideology.

Mio Pang Fei, born in 1936 in Shanghai, is an artist greatly inspired by the contemporary spirit of self-reliance. In those difficult years, although being offered a tempting job, he decided to pursue art. He received training in traditional Western art under the influence of the dean and graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Fujian (China) Normal University. When most of his classmates were wholeheartedly immersed in ‘socialist realism’, he tried hard to explore contemporary art schools — then condemned by the regime. During the Cultural Revolution, Mio studied traditional Chinese art under the instruction of Master Liu Haisu, and later, he opted to study the fusion of traditional Chinese art with Western modern trends.

In this exhibition, 18 sets of paintings and installations are shown in three series, namely ‘The Special Era’, ‘Shiu hu Series’ and ‘The Path of Neo-Orientalism. A documentary film ‘Mio Pang Fei’ is also screening. The exhibits showcase Mio’s experimental works during the Cultural Revolution, his deliberation on the possibilities of a peaceful human co-existence, as well as the achievement from his decades-long research and practice of ‘neo-orientalism’, an artistic approach transcending nationalisms that embraces Western art concepts to reconstruct an Eastern aesthetic.

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