Art Lift - Dec 22 2020
Mia Bian
Mia, a young artist living in Seattle, is a fresh-eyed Beijing girl. When she speaks, she always speaks with a smile. Her intonations are straightforward and enthusiastic. Meeting her, you definitely would not associate her with the dark undertones of her paintings, with a deep sense of self-examination.
01. "Who the hell are you?"
Mia was not born as a painter. She studied vocal music at an early age and went to the United States to study when she was an adult, where she chose economics and fine arts. From the moment she picked up a paintbrush, her world changed.
"Painting, like music, is another language, another way of speaking to the world." Most of what flowed out of her pen were her own shadows and thoughts.
Shadows and thoughts are invisible, and their reflections into the painting are strange and beautiful. Her painting blurs the boundary between reality and dream, and the dream draws the self portrait of id and ego over and over again.
Sometimes her paintings are like a distant picture in memory. The distorted lines are mixed with emotions, intertwined with the smells from childhood.
Straight, true, naked, broken... These feelings come from Mia’s daily experiences as a new immigrant and a female artist -- the shock of culture, the eyes of others, the polite and indifferent American urban life... Her painting, the fragments of her hesitation and anger, is also a precise scalpel, which mercilessly cuts open the layers of skin and puts it against the bleeding heart, asking, "Who are you?"
02. "I've never seen such a noisy girl!"
Mia grew up in the east side of a single-family house with many unusual flowers. A deep memory for her are fruits from the trees in the garden corresponding to the distinct seasons -- summer has full-bodied red crisp jujubes and is also full of exquisite pomegranate. There is the substantial solid walnut in autumn, and in winter the snow-covered branches of Chinese flowering crabapple and frozen sweet as honey persimmon…
Mia was a mischievous child. In the summer, when she participated in the neighborhood kids' "water gun war", she made a modified water gun with small holes in the caps of plastic bottles and beat all the neighborhood kids.
According to her teacher, "I've never seen such a noisy girl!" .
In the past, when she got up in the morning, she could always see her grandfather, a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, practicing calligraphy in front of the window at dawn. Now she is also an adept calligrapher, but she always humbly said that she was "not very good, not bad."
Just like the poems and ancient articles she can easily quote now, these ancient people's skills through thousands of years have already subtly become a part of the side dream. They have become the attitude and homesickness that still linger in her mind even though she traveled to the ocean.