The mixed media images and scented bone white plaster sachet mahjong tiles are joyful irreverent props from and reconstructions of  “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom,” a series portraying a mock Chinese takeover of the United States. The title comes from a popular partial Western misquotation of Mao Zedong’s “Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend.” Taken from classical Chinese poetry, Mao used this slogan to proclaim a great society where arts, academia, and “a hundred schools of thought contend.” As a result, artists and academics came out of hiding and there was a brief flowering of culture. The series began using costumes from a Beijing photography studio, specializing in getups for foreign tourists to re-enact Cultural Revolution Propaganda imagery. The models for the imagery are Pan Asian American artists and academics specializing in Chinese culture, the very group at risk in a Hundred Flowers Movement. The sachets are scented with the fictional perfume Shanghai 1956.In the heavily layered work, Qiu reconstructs fantastical notions of culture, self invented and by dissecting essential archetypes, revelatory and iconic. Never forgetful of the past, this body of work engages the constitution of the future, affirmatively critical, specifically with respect to globalistic notions of  identity and self, the social landscape, post-colonialism, and that of the larger body politic.


MEI XIAN QIU  is a Los Angeles based artist. She was born in the town of Pekalongan, on the island of Java, Indonesia, to a third generation Chinese minority family. At birth, she was given various names in preparation for societal collapse and variant potential futures, a Chinese name, an American name and an Indonesian name given by her parents, as well as a Catholic name by the local priest. In the aftermath of the Chinese and Communist genocide, the family immigrated to the United States. She was moved back and forth several times between the two countries during her childhood – her parents initial reaction to what they perceived as the amorality of life in the West countered with the uncertainty of life in Java. Partially as a result of a growing sense of restlessness, her father joined the U.S. Air force and the family lived  across the country, sometimes staying in one place for just a month at a time. She has also been based in Europe, China, and Indonesia as an adult.