Huang Yuxing is a Chinese contemporary painter known for his fluorescent paintings of abstracted landscapes and figures.
Read MoreHuang Yuxing studied at Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts, graduating from the Department of Mural Painting in 2000.
Oval shapes recur throughout Huang Yuxing's paintings, evoking organic matter from bubbles and swirls of water to the human face. In paintings titled Bubbles, from the 2010s, the artist utilises colourful bubbles as a metaphor for the '"rivers" of time and life.' One Bubbles from 2014 consists of circular, oval, and irregularly shaped bubbles that are translucent against horizontal markings that recall water or woodgrain. In another Bubbles, from 2017, fluorescent forms overlap and disperse across the canvas.
Huang favours bold, fluorescent colours, which he has described as 'the colour of our generation.' The lyrical and dynamic sensibilities of his colour palette, combined with elliptical bubbles, are also found in his depictions of water, such as the rings of neon blue-yellow, orange, and green in Big Red Whirlpools (2014).
In addition to his Bubbles paintings, Huang Yuxing is recognised for his abstracted landscapes that interrogate concepts of time and space. In his acclaimed River works, the artist deploys his characteristic oval forms to depict swirls of water, often backed by layers of undulating lines to suggest mountains.
Mountains are the core subject of such paintings as Big sculpture in the hills (2019), in which large peaks rendered in layers of rainbow colours are outlined with more jagged contours in white and black. By merging scenes of nature with the neon colours of the modern urban city, Huang hints at the inseparable relationship between humankind and nature.
In Heaps of Brocade and Ash 锦灰堆, Huang's solo exhibition at Almine Rech Brussels in 2021, the artist showed 21 works from between 2015 and 2021. Among the featured works was Black river (2020), which shows the river not in the artist's bubbles but in softly undulating lines against black, with mountains in the background that resemble those of traditional Chinese landscape painting.
The exhibition also featured Huang's more representational paintings such as Faith 2 (2019), a portrait of a man with an almost perfectly round face, and Pine in the snow (2021), a fantastical landscape featuring a lone pine tree, rendered in meticulous detail, that stands among a group of prism-like rocks.
Huang Yuxing's solo exhibitions include Heaps of Brocade and Ash 锦灰堆, Almine Rech, Brussels (2021); Essence of Landscape, König Galerie, London (2019); Kingdom of Gold, Whitestone Gallery, Taipei (2018); AND NE FORTHEDON NA, Perrotin, Hong Kong (2016); Alluvial Huang Yuxing 2005–2015, Minsheng Modern Art Museum, Shanghai (2015); Liquidus, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2015); Huang Yuxing, Beijing Commune (2012).
Huang Yuxing's works began to receive greater attention following his two institutional solo exhibitions in 2015. Collectors worldwide are increasingly interested in his works, as Rory Mitchell noted in June 2021 in Ocula Advisory.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021
