Today, her artworks can be found in international collections. Mianhua and her artworks are naturally integrated. With intuition, artistic gift, and self-study, she has developed her pictorial language, creating her world on canvases. Following an invisible pattern, her style is unique, recognizable, and vivid. Mianhua has held solo exhibitions in many prestigious art museums in China, including Shanghai Art Museum, Anhui Museum, Today Art Museum in Beijing, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shenzhen University Art Museum, and Being Art Museum in Shanghai. Currently, Mianhua travels between Shanghai and Europe.
What encouraged you to switch from editing to fine art?
After graduating from university, I worked as an editor of a magazine. One day, I painted my first oil painting in a friend’s studio. A Korean gallery owner coincidentally saw my work, immediately fell for it, and paid the deposit for two other paintings. Since then, he has been flying to Shanghai once a month, so all my early works are abroad. It was not until much later that I learned it was the first time he paid an artist deposit.
My childhood was spent in the countryside, and therefore my teacher of aesthetics is nature. About the age of five, I clearly remember, it was an afternoon when I stood in the open space in front of my door with a small branch in my hand, looking up at the sky, dreaming of myself as a painter when I grow up — given a few brushes and paints, I will have the world in my heart and under my hands.
After I grew up, I worked in different cities, always feeling that I was waiting for something. I couldn’t tell what it was, but I knew that the immediate opportunity I faced was not what I was waiting for, so I kept trying and giving up. No one understood me, only I understood and supported myself. As soon as I happened to hold the brush, I knew that this was what I had been waiting for in my life, and it seemed that all the giving up and waiting before was to test me.
I hold all visible and invisible things of the universe in such reverence. and I believe that there is a power in this world that is too big to be perceived that truly exists and influences every person’s life.
Everything is destined. I am lucky to have obtained what I dreamed of.
How has your background as an editor influenced your approach to art?
Editor is a very special job because it allows me to contact people from all different backgrounds who have wonderful lives. Communicating with them engenders thoughts and self-reflection that can quickly enhance and broaden my horizons and mind. I think this is definitely influential and helpful in forming the spiritual core of artistic creation.
What themes do you deal with? How do they manifest in your paintings and installations?
All of my works are unified by a single theme: love and life. All life has been poetic and divine since its inception. All lasting beauty and love contain sorrow. My art work always revolves around the grandeur and subtleties of life itself and everything it involves. This may be a clichéd theme, but to me, humanity encompasses everything. In almost every one of my solo exhibitions, I could see viewers with tears in their eyes in front of my works; I always walked away silently and never disturbed them.
I create with all my heart, and my works, once completed, will have their own emotions and languages that the audience can see and talk to.
Can you describe your creative process?
I never do drafts. Usually, when I face a blank canvas, I internally connect my heart with that blankness. As soon as my brush touches the canvas, everything will grow freely — paints, canvas, and time, we decide where to go together. Of course, there are also times when I don’t know what to draw. In this case, I leave and go laboring in the garden, read books, or take a walk. Even in those times, the blank canvas lingers in my heart, and the picture will slowly grow with time.
Living in Shanghai, how does the city influence your style?
Shanghai is a very charming cosmopolis with its unique way of accepting and blending Eastern and Western cultures. Shanghai is also a city with a great sense of propriety, where people know how to respect others and themselves.
Living in Shanghai, I can sense the visual clashes and influences of different cultures and continue to learn and grow. If I had to say what influence Shanghai has had on my style, I think it would be the freedom of my spiritual world and my self-confidence.
How do you choose your artistic techniques to convey the complexity and vitality of life in your artworks?
My artistic style and creation always follow my internal guidance and I never consider the selection of artistic techniques. I use subtle colors as metaphors for the divinity and grandeur of life, hiding many foreshadowings in details, and the image is always growing, surging, and therefore flowing. I always believe that love and life transcend language and time and that complexity and simplicity are one and the same, which needs no explanation.
I always warn myself not to be too clever and to keep a kind of simplicity, humbleness, and unpretentiousness, to see and thank for what I already have. These, too, have always been in my works.
Live up to time like grass and trees and create devoutly. That’s what I’ve always thought.
We visited the Liaunig Museum together. What were your first thoughts when we got out of the car and you saw the museum amidst the Carinthian landscape?
The weather was so good that day! Beneath the blue sky and the white clouds, surrounded by the vast mountains, our car was parked next to a wheat field. The breeze brushed the wheat awns, enabling different colors softly undulating in the wind. Looking up from not far away, the white Liaunig Museum was like a train flying past from the time tunnel, as if it had already flown for years and years, old and yet young. The museum is half embedded in the earth and half facing the sky, like a huge dream, standing still, looking at everything and knowing everything.
The long main hall of the museum is flanked by huge floor-to-ceiling glasses, the artworks in the gallery engaging in a silent dialog with nature outside the window. At that time, I thought that the people who created and built this art museum were truly amazing, for they not only knew about art but also about people and time.
I was so touched.
What impression did you gather during your stay in Europe?
The rich cultural and artistic atmosphere of Europe has always deeply attracted me, and every time coming there brings me something new. It’s mesmerizing and always novel. No matter what kind of changes the world has undergone, art is always a bridge that transcends countries and time, allowing the civilization created by people of different languages, colors, and cultures to communicate and persist to shine brightly.
Has your artistic approach changed as a result of your time in Europe?
No. Changes in artistic styles, if any, are the result of long-time internal brewing and not quick formation.
But living in a foreign country does bring some subtle new feelings.
This time, I created some small-scale paintings in Vienna. A group of works on paper is named “Firebird.” I have always loved Stravinsky’s music — it fascinates me with a kind of magic “raw” that does not belong to human beings. This group of works was created while listening to his Firebird. Another group of oil paintings, praising and celebrating the divinity of life, is named “Myth.” There are also two other oil paintings named “The Garden of Athena.”
Are there any upcoming projects or exhibitions you are particularly excited about?
Yes, I am planning to show several works in Vienna soon. Vienna is a city of rich heritage and understated elegance, with so much to explore again and again. I look forward to returning to Vienna soon.
Mianhua – www.instagram.com/mianhuastudio/, www.mianhua-art.com