One of the
most noteworthy characteristics of traditional Chinese painting,
highly regarded throughout the world for its theory, modes of
expression and techniques, is the frequent use of shifting perspective
within a single painting. One Chinese painting may simultaneously
depict activity within and without a village house, a palace,
a temple, as well as on mountains looming in the far distance.
For centuries, the Chinese painter's freedom from the restrictions
of time and space has enabled him to express himself unhampered
by the limitations imposed by everyday reality. Painter Huang
Yi has embraced these traditional Chinese techniques, while blending
them seamlessly with contemporary Western theoretical and stylistic
approaches to painting.
Huang Yi was
born in 1968 in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province in southeastern
China, a culturally rich repository of Chinese history and art
that has been inhabited for over 5,000 years. Nanjing, China's
capital during a total of ten imperial dynasties, including the
Ming Dynasty, is home to Nanjing Arts Institute, established in
1921, where Huang earned a degree in 1991 from the institution's
Department of Oil Painting. From 1996 to 1998, Huang pursued research
and advanced studies in oil painting at China Central Art College;
at present, he is a tutor at the Nanjing Arts Institute.
Once called
"The Capital of Heaven," Nanjing has been recognized as the cultural
and educational center of southern China for more than 1700 years.
As such, painter Huang Yi has been perfectly positioned to take
advantage of the immense cultural resources surrounding him there.
In addition, his university studies and research have afforded
him the opportunity to thoroughly immerse himself in the study
of Western art history and theory. Huang's paintings reflected
the duality of his native environment and impressive arts education.
Stylistically,
Huang feels he has been most influenced by the work and thought
of Fan Kuan (circa 990 - 1030 A.D.), a brilliant Chinese landscape
master of the Song Dynasty who, appropriately enough, was listed
by Life Magazine in 2000 as 59th of the 100 most
important people of the last millennium. Fan Kuan based his lush,
flowing watercolor-and-ink-on-silk-scroll paintings of mountainous
scenery on the central Daoist principles of Laozi (580-500 B.C
), i.e. becoming one with the changing forms and eternal laws
of nature -- and embracing the belief that nature is not a background
for human existence and experience, but rather a whole of which
humans are a mere part. Huang cites the work of Song Dynasty court
painter, poet and scholar Mi Youren (1074-1151), who raised the
integral "poem-painting" to high art, as another important factor
bearing upon his own visual style, together with that of Dong
Qichang (1555-1637) of the Ming Dynasty, a painter, critic, collector
and scholar whose writings on the history of Chinese painting
remain significant to this day. Huang's imagination has also been
piqued by the highly calligraphic and poetic painting of Zhu Da
(1626-1705), an artist-poet who became a Buddhist monk, eventually
went mad, left his monastery and became an itinerant painter,
wandering from place to place creating memorable masterpieces
(in 1985, Unesco recognized Zhu Da as one of China's top ten cultural
figures).
The realistic
style of America's iconic "painter of the people," Andrew Wyeth,
and the pop culture-inspired work of Robert Rauschenberg, which
often comments on contemporary society using the very imagery
that has helped to produce that society, have both made a lasting
mark on Huang's paintings. These paintings explore the effect
of post-modern industrialization on the human spirit, as well
as man's unquenchable delight in and reverence for the aesthetics,
lyricism and dignity inherent in the details of his workaday environment.
Huang Yi's
Pattern of the Object is a prime example of the
fusion of Eastern and Western thought and technique the artist
skillfully effects in both his painting style and critical content.
In muted, almost monochromatic tones, Huang presents what seems
to be the remains of some uncased electronic device atop a cement
pillar, above which mysteriously appears broken light bulbs and
diodes, though the view we get of the latter is one the viewer
would expect only if positioned above and looking down at these
objects. The electronic detritus is displayed frontally, as if
it were some sacred object or offering on a post-modern ancestral
altar. Huang's imagery is Daoist in spirit, uniting simplicity
and complexity, clarity and mystery. Pattern of the Object
defies our sense of reality, physics and holiness, using Fan Kuan's
ancient approach to different points of perspective, both literally
and figuratively. Pattern also harnesses the quality of critiquing
societal and cultural mores, as mastered by Rauschenberg, by deftly
combining mundane, discarded objects and images in a single work
of art.
Huang Yi--Pattern
of the Object
Through deconstruction
of an object, its components take on distinct identities of their
own-individual faces and personalities, no longer lost in the
crowd of familiarity.
Huang Yi-Still
Life
As light grazes
across the smooth roundness of the delicate glass objects, We
are aware of the strong counterpiont in the cold, imposing concrete
walls that surround them. This painting signifies the juxtaposition
of the bright, fragile human life, engulfed by an environment
of hard edges and man-made walls. The hope for the future is represented
by the seeds of the fruit in the foreground.
