Light

Mou Huan

Contemporary-Art.org
Keywords: Light

Work Overview

Mou Huan (Chinese name 牟桓, 1959 - ; graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute), his portraits reflect an aspect of today's society that people take refuge more and more behind their personal circumstances. The faces of those he portrays are undefined, transferrable, and atomized as though they belonged to the "masses" that Ortega y Gasset spoke about a hundred years ago. In fact, the faces of his characters on many occasions do not exist at all, but are mere circumferences that could fit any member of a one-dimensional society.

Mou Huan's figures seem to move "between the spaces". They gain in symbolic power because as anonymous, faceless and placeless creatures they are still in quest of their form and destiny - and have obviously not yet achieved the stage of the individual. When the artist himself describes his creatures as "foreigners," it makes sense. One can see that they have not yet entirely arrived in the world, here and now.