Chris Huen Sin-kan Finds Magic in the Mundane

Despite painting what he calls ‘the ordinariness of my unsubstantial experiences’, Chris Huen Sin-kan‘s paintings are far from ordinary.

The Hong Kong artist employs considered strokes of diluted oil paint in soft tones to capture familiar scenes—from the woods where he walks his dogs, MuiMui and Balltsz, to the gardens he visits with his family.

His paintings are richly detailed and complex, with figurative forms entangled among abstract elements like flecks and flickers of paint, reminiscent of pointillism, or segments of negative space suffusing the work with luminosity. Such elements evoke scenes akin to half-remembered dreams or memories.

Matt Carey-Williams, formerly a senior director at Victoria Miro, showcases Huen’s hazy paintings in the exhibition, Forwards and Backwards, Back and Forth (11 April–25 May 2024) at his gallery, Matt Carey-Williams at 12 Porchester Place, London.

In works like Joel (2024) and Balltsz (2024), Huen depicts his son and his dog. These figures occupy carefully decorated spaces that represent moments from Huen’s past and present life.

In Joel, the artist situates his son among lilac wisteria and sage green leaves. The familiar shapes of the foliage morph into scrawled outlines in fading colours, indicating Huen’s intention to emphasise his subject. By incorporating more detail, brighter colours, and nuanced lighting around his son, he encourages viewers to linger, drawing their gaze towards the focal point with greater intensity. The fading detail evokes a sense of urgency, as if Huen is racing to record a fond memory, urging us to glimpse at it before it fades into ambiguity and is eventually forgotten.

In conversation with Ocula in 2020, Huen explained how his work depicts his process of understanding a scene. ‘I work on several paintings at once, allowing time and space to escape from being overly concentrated on a single picture, as what I want to depict is the experience of witnessing an accumulation of scenes from daily life, rather than specific moments.’

Forwards and Backwards, Back and Forth offers viewers space to move between the immediacy of experience and the imagining of memory, highlighting the beauty in both.

Carey-Williams’ essay on the paintings adds another layer of poetry to the show. In I. The Poetry of Pose, he writes, ‘Huen wants his viewer to knowingly drift between earthly, grounded prose and empyreal, magical poetry as if lifted by a gentle hallucination, yet remain anchored to the reality of his figure and focus.’