Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Meng Qiu

Review of Artist Meng Qiu Site.

The first page you get to is an opening page, devoid of anything other than the spinning graphic and only serves to waste time getting to the actual site. Once inside you are at first greeted with a bright, but well designed page, nicely laid out and professional looking. The site however is full of slightly odd witting of a semi-spiritual nature. Not quiet the impenetrable ramblings of the post-modernist. But it's certainly hard to follow and seemly made to give the art work some kind of validity. It's unclear if the artist wants to be a painter or a poet. But neither quiet hits the mark. The poems and ramblings fail to make the work any more appealing and in some ways serve as just a distraction and space filler. The work is interesting, but there is far far to little of it. The coloured paintings remind me of those children's colouring books, that start out black and a special pen removes the black to reveal the colours below. Given time this style could emerge into something better, but it does not yet feel like it's matured. With only three paintings on display its hard. The Print page, shows just the one idea that is essentially dull, semi abstract photography made blue and printed, and better examples of this kind of work can be seen in many other places, and executed far better by others. The page "collections" seems to be an odd and ends section and doesn't really tell me anything other than the artist has some sketches they uploaded.
In conclusion we are faced with another self elevated artist offering a few works but asking for far too much for them with the added insult giving change of $1 when buying his work for £10,000. A price I doubt anyone with any sense would pay for an "emerging artist" in these times of economic downturn.

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