Focusing on the absurd

An avant-garde artist's use of surrealism in photography receives huzzas from progressives and boos from traditionalists. Zhang Kun reports.

Ma Liang's previous neighbors thought he was "up to no good". Since the photographer and painter - better known as Maleonn, a name he chose for himself to avoid being confused with two other renowned artists who share his birth name - moved into his new studio in Shanghai, his neighbors haven't suspected he's doing anything unusual. But, the 38-year-old says, many viewers of his bizarre photography do.

Maleonn has established a unique style that combines theatrical stills with surrealistic fantasy.

One of his images is of a man with a giant tomato for a head, wandering European streets while dressed as an emperor.

Another shows amateur actors posed in awkward fighting scenes in a sitting room designed according to aesthetic sensibilities that hail back to the 1970s.

Stranger Yet is a photograph of chicken meat and fake human skeletons arranged to depict scenes from ancient Chinese poems.

The country's photographic community bitterly criticized his early works when he posted them online. The ways in which his shots featured illusion and absurdity violated the country's photographic traditions, he says.

"People always want some degree of truth in photography," he says.

"You can paint illusions, but presenting them in photographs seems to confuse viewers."

Recognition came gradually and from different fields - he is sometimes exhibited as a photographer and at other times as a contemporary artist.

"I studied painting for more than 10 years, but when I decided to turn to original art creation, I found the adeptness of my skills stopped me from free expression. So, I turned to photography," he says.

"I was inspired by the strong contrast of the realness of photography and the wayward imagination of my mind."

Maleonn's photos are widely exhibited at home and abroad. His works appeared in shows in Denmark, Australia, France, the United States and Norway in 2010. And he was invited to display his images at the Dutch and Madrid pavilions of the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

"I'm a self-appointed artist," he says. "Nobody granted me the title, and I don't belong to any art association."

He's a zealous collector of antique photographs and has purchased thousands from second-hand markets over the past decade.

"It's not the photos themselves that interest me. The people in them and their experiences are intriguing," he says.

Since June 2010, he has started to write about his antique photo collection on micro blog platform, Sina Weibo.

He points out relevant historical details and speculate about the portrayed people's professions, social statuses, intentions and emotions. Maleonn hopes to someday compile these images into a book.

"These old photos are like a balance to my own art," he explains.

"Every one of them holds one tip of a teeterboard. I can play with the most ridiculous ideas in my creation, and yet remain true to life's simple and real emotions as reflected in these old pictures."

There are two reasons Maleonn moved most of the weird objects - odd props, peculiar costumes and other strange flotsam - from his studio a few months ago. One is that they were displayed at the 2010 Shanghai Biennale. The other is that he is being evicted.

Shanghai Biennale curators were impressed when they visited his studio at 696 Weihai Road - the last organic artist community in the downtown area since Maleonn moved in as the first artist in 2005.

They decided to exhibit the contents of his studio, rather than his works, as the space was the staging ground for Maleonn's "crazy ideas".

It is in the 200-square-meter space that Maleonn makes props and shoots photos. Canvases lean against its walls, tools are piled in corners and a massive punching bag dangles from the ceiling in the middle of the room. The studio is also his reception room, workshop, boxing-training center and home to his cat.

"Tourists used to visit my studio as a stop on their artistic tours of China," Maleonn says. "It was on their tourism maps."

But he'll have to move out in six months, when the space is slated for renovation. Although the basic structure will likely survive the renovations, rent will likely "increase so much that I may not be able to afford it. Such is the authority's plan to manufacture a 'creative community'," he says, sneering.

"They are doing real estate development in the name of creativity. Actually, they are making it harder for us."

The journey that brought him to where he is today began seven years ago, when he grew bored with his job shooting animation clips for Channel V and commercials. He quit to become an independent photographic artist.

His first studio was in an old house on Shanghai's Urumqi Road, in the heart of the former French Concession.

"It was a tiny place in an old residential community," he recalls.

His elderly neighbors would often cast suspicious gazes at him, when he would build odd props or shoot strange shots in his back yard.

The house was too small, so he soon decided to find a new studio.

The 696 Weihai Road was a compound of several buildings, the oldest of which was built about a century ago.

"It was home to a rich opium dealer. Part of the house used to be an opium lounge," Maleonn says.

Antiquated mosaics adorning the floor of the corridor serve as reminders of the past opulence.

The compound became an electronics parts factory after 1949, and remained so until the plant went bankrupt in the 1990s, when the buildings were deserted.

It then became a warehouse for the stocks of the auto parts stores that sprung up on Weihai Road.

"The metal parts were heavy, so most shops only rented the ground floors," Maleonn recalls.

"The upstairs rooms were all empty, and I became the first artist to move in."

Now, the compound hosts between 20 and 30 studios, creative workshops and galleries.

"The landlord told me the place would be torn down from the first day," Maleonn says.

Consequently, lease contracts have been signed every three months.

"I was repeatedly told that we would have to move out soon, but this time it's for real," he says.

"This is probably the last organic art community in downtown Shanghai. The local authorities claim to support original art and creative industries, but what they actually do is destroy the fragile organic cultural ecology."

Once evicted, he says, 696's artists will probably have to move to faraway suburbs.

But wherever he ends up, Maleonn will create photos that wander between reality and fantasy, and ordinary life and extraordinary concepts - and do so to acclaim and notoriety.

(China Daily 02/09/2011 page18)