The Last Judgment in Cyberspace – Where Will I Go?, 2006

Miao Xiaochun is a photographer and new media artist whose intermedia approach combines documentary and narrative strategies in the photographic medium with performative, painterly, sculptural, and filmic techniques in a 3-D virtual environment. Both technologies serve to explore interconnected topics such as China’s rapid economic and cultural transformation, questions of identity and self-representation, and the history of art and media, all of which intersect on the overarching themes of cultural globalization and shifts of global power relations.
The work shown here, The Last Judgment in Cyberspace – Where Will I Go?, is a sequel to Miao Xiaochun’s first 3-D-based work, The Last Judgment in Cyberspace (2006), constituting a virtual replica of Michelangelo’s late Renaissance fresco The Last Judgment (1533–1541). Miao recreated Michelangelo’s masterpiece by transposing the original painting’s scenic elements into virtual space, and replacing its four hundred male and female figures with an ethnically marked virtual clone modeled after himself, the layered views of which were subsequently captured in a series of black-and-white digital photographs. The video’s added narrative amplifies the themes of artistic admiration and transgression while also imagining interactive strategies in the emergence of new cultural and visual interspaces. (IS)