Life imitating art, art imitating life

You might envy China artist Feng Mengbo. After all, his job involves playing computer games and calling it art.

Life imitating art, art imitating life

The exhibition here, Built To Order: r_drawworld 0, features two series of prints on canvas by him. One is based on screenshots from his Quake works.

He says, "I discovered I could take thousands of screenshots at random and find meaning in them. There is an aesthetic in these still images that motion cannot mimic."

In fact, he goes so far as to compare his fluid screenshots with the action paintings of American abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock.

The other series features iconic images of Mao Zedong, executed as though the late Chinese leader was a three-dimensional character in a blockish computer game landscape.

In a sale of contemporary Asian art at Sotheby's in New York last month, one of his Mao prints, titled 2006LII02, was sold for USD45,600.

The Mao prints are a nod towards both Chinese portrait painting as well as Andy Warhol's colourful silkscreen renditions of the leader.

As Feng points out in the exhibition catalogue, there was a saying during the Cultural Revolution that only artists who had official permits were allowed to attempt painting Chairman Mao.

"Andy Warhol certainly didn't have a permit," Feng notes wryly.

It is precisely Warhol's opportunistic turning of art into mass-manufactured products in the 1960s that he wants to explore.

More