[Press Release]
About My Private Museum – Feng Mengbo
Feng Mengbo is one of mainland China’s more versatile, innovative and recognized new media artists. Known for skillfully and playfully imbuing computer technologies with historically and culturally significant narratives, his works convey the deep contradictions that characterize contemporary China—its communist past and consumerist present, its long history and traditions and its dizzying transformation into a world power.
In this most recent photographic series, “My Private Museum” he focused a camera lens on the displays and dioramas in the Shanghai Natural History Museum. Opened in 1956, the museum is now run-down, and yet in this state it provides and unobstructed view into China’s past ideology, creativity and the organization of the museum’s workers. The museum professionals, who at the time could not leave their country to reference what they were creating, worked in a spirit of camaraderie and collaboration to build elaborate tableaux using simple means and their imagination. Additionally, the evolutionary narrative common to most Natural History dioramas, in this museum has a particular ideological twist. At the Shanghai Natural History Museum, the development of species is not only a biological occurrence—but is subtly linked to the Communist idea of the inevitable fruition of the socialist revolution.
