Maleonn: From Recognition at the Victoria & Albert to the BBC Culture Show during the Beijing Olympics

Today's posting is a quick one. This morning I saw one of the works from Maleonn’s Days on the Cotton Candy series flash up on a BBC World News trailer (channel 194 in Toronto). It was so fast I did not firmly register which work, but it seemed to have been Days on the Cotton Candy No 6 (reproduced above).

That work and others will be profiled as part of BBC’s The Culture Show in China, which airs Eastern Standard Time at 10:10 on Saturday, August 9. It will include an interview of Maleonn and shots of his studio in Shanghai. If you happen to be around the TV for the Beijing Olympics, you may want to channel surf to BBC to see how they use his work in their show.

This series is (at least, on the surface) the most pop-culture-y of all Maleonn's series to date, and very different from a series like Secondhand Tang Poems (about which more in later blog), but, as with all his work, there is more sub-text than first meets the eye. Certainly, from an external perspective, the series' location at the intersection of fine art photography and (theatrically constructed) design caught the eye of the curators of the recently-ended huge CHINA DESIGN NOW exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Four works from Days on the Cotton Candy were displayed, and one of them (Days on the Cotton Candy No 4, below) was given pride-of-place treatment in the book published by the V and A to coincide with the exhibition by having a section of the work being reproduced as a full two-page spread as the first photograph in the 158-photo, 190-page book, immediately after the Table of Contents: Zhang Hongxing and Lauren Parker, China Design Now (London: Victoria and Albert Publishing, 2008).

Magically realist - Maleonn alongside Colville in South Korea

Public Art, now one of the leading art magazines in South Korea, has recently come out with its May 2008 issue on the theme of SURREALISM and Maleonn is one of seven artists who are the focus of a 10-page editorial feature text-and-images essay, “Magic Realism,” on the global art scene. Alongside three reproduced images of Maleonn’s work are five images of Michael Parkes, two images by Vladimir Kush, two images by George Tooker, one image each by Patricia van Lubeck and Peter Blume, and four images by hyperrealist Canadian artist Alex Colville.

Although we tend to prefer the terms "fantastical" or "fabulist" to describe much of Maleonn’s body of work (as indeed noted by the Public Art editorial with its article byline, “Looking for fantasy in daily life, feeling the marvelous in reality…the world of ‘magic realism’”), Maleonn’s work is also most definitely connected to the “surreal” art tradition. The works selected for commentary in the editorial and as examples of Maleonn’s work are at p. 60 “Shanghai Boys No 10 (Dancing With Eyes Shut)” (the same work chosen for full-page reproduction by Enroute magazine in spring 2006; image to the right); “Unforgivable Children No 1 (Love)” at p. 61; and “Portrait of Mephisto No 5” at p 62 (image below). (“Magic Realism,”, Public Art (South Korea), Issue 20 (May 2008), pp 56-65. )

Incidentally, readers may be interested to learn that “Portrait of Mephisto No 5” was refused by the Paris-based International Herald Tribune for use in a booked Craig Scott Gallery ad in an art advertising section of the IHT. The gallery cancelled the booking, not without noting to IHT the irony of Western corporate (media, no less) censorship of a boundary-pushing Chinese artist.