Drawing from found images on the Internet and her own observations, peppered with imagination, Huang Hai-Hsin captures daily life under a humorous and sardonic lens in her paintings and drawings.
Read MoreThe awkward and sometimes dark-humoured twists on ordinary situations in Huang Hai-Hsin's paintings stem from what she described as 'frustrating life experiences' in her 2017 interview with BRIC Arts Media. After graduating from National Taipei University of Education in 2007, Huang relocated to an entirely new environment: New York, where she obtained her MFA from School of Visual Arts two years later. She experienced the city both as a foreigner and a young woman, navigating through a string of upturned expectations.
Huang Hai-Hsin's earlier works often depict unsettling domestic scenes. Someone invariably chokes at a family gathering or birthday table, while the wedding cake is set on fire in paintings with such titles as Family Day Crisis or Birthday Crisis made between 2012 and 2013. Horror is a more explicit theme in other works as in Mary and Her Little Bunny (2013) or Johnny and His Little Bunny (2014), which show impeccably dressed children biting on a rabbit's ear.
Huang Hai-Hsin began to garner critical attention for her series of paintings entitled 'A Museum Show' (2016–2017), which developed from her observations of visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Combining 'the sensibilities of a caricaturist and an anthropologist', in the words of art critic and curator Benjamin Sutton in a 2016 article for Hyperallergic, Huang captures the acts of self-fashioning that take place at museums. In China Wing (2016), for example, she parallels the ancient Chinese vessels on display with patrons taking selfies or pictures before them; the artefacts are not the only objects for viewing in this scene.
Huang expanded her depictions of the culture of viewing to major art fairs in Art Basel (2019), aptly presented at Art Basel Hong Kong 2019. Almost covering an entire wall, the drawing shows the numerous booths and activities that make up the fair including attendees taking selfies for their SNS. Another pencil drawing, entitled After Art Basel (2020), moves onto the aftermath of the fair, when everyone is eager to dismantle and leave.
After Art Basel was included in Taipei Biennial 2020 alongside River of Little Happiness (2015), a large-scale oil painting that weaves snippets of present-day amusement and predicaments together. Women receive foot massages in one section while two figures hide under a table one fire; others sunbathe as factories in the background release black and white smoke into the ominously pink sky.
Have A Good Day, Double Square Gallery, Taipei (2020); Huang Hai-Hsin: The Common Places, Capsule Shanghai (2018); Halo, Lai Pi Hsi, Museum der bildenden Künste (MdbK), Leipzig (2017); A Museum Show - Hai-Hsin Huang Solo Exhibition, Gallery 456, New York (2016).
You And I Don't Live On the Same Planet, Taipei Biennial 2020; Pinky Swear, Everspring Museum of Fine Art, Taichung, Taiwan (2020); _3331 Art Fai_r, 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo (2020); Painting from Taiwan, Eli Klein Gallery, New York (2019); Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Juming Museum, New Taipei City, Taiwan (2019); Catastrophe and the Power of Art, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2018); Dear My Wedding Dress, Seoul Museum (2018); The Possibility of an Island: 2016 Taiwan Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2016).
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2020
