The above image is by Zhong Biao 钟飙 (b. 1968), a Sichuan artist now living in Beijing and Chongqing. The piece is entitled “Mirage” 海市蜃楼 and was on display at the Denver Art Museum with sixteen other installations in an exhibition called “Embrace” (November – April, 2010). The work’s most prominent feature is its size: 400 by 1800 cm.  The material is acrylic on canvas, though a substantial portion of the canvas (not depicted above) is for video projection.

Another notable feature of this installation, on a personal note, is the somewhat boyish looking little girl in the lower right corner; my daughter.  Zhong Biao works from photographs, and many of the figures in the painting contain friends and acquaintances.  Indeed, the relative fields of distance with respect to the artist himself are worthy of comment, though I am still collecting thoughts (and data) on this subject.  For the moment, and to give interested viewers more of a sense of things, the accompanying video (“Embrace“) contains footage of the opening of “Embrace” in Denver, some introductory remarks by Daniel Libeskind, words of welcome by Zhong Biao himself (translated by independent curator Tom Whitten) and some footage of the exhibition space.