The Art Room新展｜马辰立 & 米勒“叠影重重”

A World of Overlapping Images

“ The world is flat ” — this seemingly provocative statement was proposed by economist Thomas Friedman at the beginning of the 21st century.

Yet the perspective of art had already anticipated this shift long before economics. In the mid-20th century, Clement Greenberg declared that “painting is flat,” arguing that modern painting should be rooted in the two-dimensional surface rather than attempting to imitate three-dimensional space.

Since then, generations of artists have pursued the possibilities of flatness within painting — from abstraction presented in museum spaces to graffiti emerging from the streets.

From Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting to Pop Art and street graffiti, artists have collectively moved away from the classical principles of linear perspective and three-dimensional illusion. Depth has gradually disappeared from the painted surface, replaced by layers of images and visual structures that continuously unfold in different forms.

Against this background, Chinese contemporary street artist KIDDY and British artist Stuart McAlpine Miller both construct their visual languages through the expression of layered imagery, creating a dialogue between their distinct practices.

For KIDDY, overlapping layers become a method of deconstructing, fragmenting, and reconstructing graphic elements. Through the translucent application of spray paint and pigments, he creates shifting layers of light, texture, and spatial perception.

Miller’s Pop Art practice similarly explores the effects of layering. By placing semi-transparent representations of real female figures on the surface and combining them with fictional elements such as cartoon imagery beneath, he creates scenes where reality and imagination merge and overlap.

Through the works of these two artists, viewers enter an unreal visual landscape shaped by layers of accumulated images. Perhaps this is another form of “truth” that painting can reveal: the world, like painting itself, is not merely flat — it is composed of countless overlapping reflections.

Everything can be reconstructed and reorganized within these layers.

KIDDY is a street artist and graphic designer. Born in Dalian, China, he graduated from the China Academy of Art in 2012 and currently lives and works in Hangzhou.

KIDDY’s practice spans large-scale murals, works on canvas, sculpture, installation and new media. He extends his distinctive language of deconstructed abstraction across different artistic media, leaving space for viewers to form their own reflections and interpretations. His practice originates from an ongoing process of examining and reorganizing the material and informational excess of contemporary life.

Influenced by his early art training and Hip-Hop culture, KIDDY began creating graffiti in 2007. Starting with street lettering, he gradually moved beyond the conventions of both traditional graffiti and academic design, developing a distinctive language of deconstructed abstraction. The graphic forms and lines in his work derive from the visual refinement and graphic memory accumulated through years of street writing, and can also be understood as a kind of bodily “muscle memory.”

In his practice, KIDDY focuses on achieving balance at the fundamental level of the composition. By deconstructing, dispersing and reorganizing graphic elements, he applies an almost obsessive degree of control in continually approaching the threshold of equilibrium. This abstract language functions both as a reconstruction of visual structure and as a reorganisation of order itself. Balanced and fluid yet sharp and charged with tension, his forms may remain purely abstract or generate entirely new figurative subjects from within the system, reflecting his perception of the world and his enduring enthusiasm for life.

In recent years, KIDDY has collaborated with brands including Aston Martin, Mercedes-Benz, NIKE, Jordan, Under Armour, NBA, Alibaba, Tmall, Kohler, Li Auto, Volkswagen, Levi’s, JNBY, Mishka, Dewu, Nongfu Spring, Harbin Beer, Mentos and Warrior.

Stuart McAlpine Miller is a leading British contemporary Pop artist. Born in 1964 in Stevenston, Ayrshire, Scotland, he graduated from the Glasgow School of Art. With a strong foundation in classical painting and a distinctive contemporary Pop vocabulary, his practice brings traditional techniques into dialogue with the visual language of popular culture.

During his early training, McAlpine Miller focused extensively on classical realism and the modelling of light and shadow, studying the techniques of Old Masters such as Caravaggio and Hieronymus Bosch. Works from his degree show were acquired en bloc by a London gallery dealer. From 1996 onwards, his work gained increasing recognition within the professional gallery and museum circuit, leading to exhibitions in London, New York and Chicago. In 2004, he was commissioned by Paul McCartney to hand-paint a piano for his European tour, further expanding his international profile. His work has since been presented at art fairs and galleries across Hong Kong, Italy, the United States and China, and is held in numerous institutional, charitable and private collections, including that of J.K. Rowling.

McAlpine Miller’s practice is grounded in classical realist techniques, upon which he builds multiple transparent layers of Pop imagery and figurative elements. Through his work, he examines the illusions of perfection produced by the media, consumer society and the fleeting glamour of celebrity culture. His overlapping and blurred images suggest that the polished ideals pursued by contemporary society are themselves composed of multiple layers of illusion, as memory, desire and popular symbols continually intersect and erode one another’s boundaries.

Since 2000, McAlpine Miller has maintained exhibition collaborations with a number of international galleries, including Catto Gallery, Duncan Miller Gallery and Rebecca Hossack Gallery in London; Ruth O’Hara Gallery in New York; and SOTA Gallery in Hong Kong.