Tigre

For his artwork, Mi Shenghao began by reflecting on his personal identity and cultural background. He turned to traditional Chinese culture, reinterpreting it through his own visual language. While modest in scale, the resulting work aims to act as a small key, a way of opening the door to another cultural system.
Rather than focusing on practicality, Mi approached the glasses as a sculptural object. He chose the figure of the tiger as his central motif, a powerful and enigmatic animal that appears across both Eastern and Western cultures. In China, the tiger holds a significant place in painting, sculpture, and poetry. Its strength and flexibility made it an ideal reference for exploring the material's expressive potential.
A dynamic tiger stretches across the front of the glasses, its forelegs transforming into the frames, capturing both energy and stillness. The texture of muscle, fur, and claw marks is engraved into the surface, bringing the piece to life and adding a sense of space

Mi Shenghao, born in Shanghai, China, studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and later earned his master's degree from the Brera Academy in Milan. He currently lives and works in Shanghai.

His practice aims to strike a balance between the abstract and the figurative. For Mi, overly sharp or precise images leave no space for an intimate, inquiring gaze; the eye is trapped in perfection. Blurring becomes a visual strategy: the subjects remain recognisable, but the alienating effect of intentional imperfection invites the viewer to engage in a more in-depth analysis of the figures.
Mi's works often take animal imagery as a starting point, experimenting with painting on various surfaces and attempting to connect different forms of works into an ongoing narrative. Although human figures rarely appear, the presence of the viewer, as observer and interpreter, is always part of the scene. The various animals depicted attempt to echo human conditions and emotional states.