The painting exhibition ‘Persian Princess’ by the young self-taught Chinese artist Mowen Li was inaugurated on Friday at Ace Art Gallery in Tehran.
It includes 60 paintings the artist created during her stay in Iran last year, as the head of AIESEC in Iran, an international non-governmental not-for-profit organization that provides young people with leadership development, cross-cultural global internships, and volunteer exchange experience across the globe.
The 26-year-old artist who has again traveled to Iran to attend her exhibit had not pursued a career in art before her first trip to Iran and just did drawings as a hobby.
All the paintings in Persian Princess depict women wearing ‘chador’, a full-body semicircular piece of fabric, usually black, used by some Muslim women to cover the body while leaving the face uncovered. The colorful paintings are adorned with many details in the background and on the chadors.
On the reason why all the depicted figures are wearing chador, Mowen told the Financial Tribune that before coming to Iran she did not have a positive idea about Iranians from the images presented by the media, and she was even sort of anxious about Iranian women and their black apparel when she was younger.
However, spending a year in Iran and visiting Iranian women changed her thinking about them and she began to see their real and inner attractiveness from behind the black chador. “With my paintings I’m actually showing the inner beauty in them,” Mowen said.
To the amazement of the gallery visitors, all the women in her paintings have a mustache. When asked about the reason she says, “In my country men are always clean-shaven, but here it is common among men to wear a mustache. I found Iranian men are handsome, so I wanted my works to have something associated with them as well.”
For her early paintings under the title of Persian Princess, she chose 10 of her favorite painters including Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, Gustav Klimt and Sandro Botticelli, and imagined what the paintings might have looked like if a Persian princess had appeared in their works; so she created her paintings following their style.
Inspired by Historical Sites
Some of the paintings are inspired by the places Mowen visited in Iran like Nasir ol-Mulk Mosque in Shiraz, Fars Province, the shrine of Shah-Cheragh also in Shiraz and historical palace of Hasht Behesht (eight paradises) in Isfahan.
In some of her other paintings, she has depicted the Persian Princess in well-known fairy tales like ‘Nightingale and the Rose’ and ‘Alladin’, while in others the Persian Princess has taken a trip to countries like Indonesia, Cyprus, Japan, Morocco and Nepal, countries Mowen herself has visited. The chadors of women in the paintings are adorned with symbols and emblems attributed to those countries.
“I’d rather draw what I remember than what I saw, so I chose 10 special countries I have visited and painted the memory of incidents I encountered there,” she wrote on her website about the paintings.
Also on display at the gallery is her journal containing paintings she has drawn with crayons during the trip she began from Tehran to Gilan, Isfahan and Fars, during the Norouz (Persian New Year) holidays in 2016).
Her notebook is an old book that has turned yellow and which she had bought from a Friday Market in Tehran. On one page she has drawn a woman whose face and chador are painted with a design similar to a part of a handmade carpet she had seen in the town of Naeen near Isfahan.
“I desire to erase all the sufferings with my art” a note in a large white font on top of her personal website (Mowenart.com) says.
Mowen’s works will remain on view through April 26 at Ace Gallery, located at No. 1831, next to Parsian Bank on Shariati Avenue.
