Huang Yuxing - New Now & Design Hong Kong Sunday, November 26, 2023 | Phillips

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  • “These ovals are sometimes human faces, sometimes swirls, sometimes amplifier, and sometimes bubbles. They exist in the same scene in different ways which is an important clue in my artwork.”
    — Huang Yuxing

     

    The prominent Chinese artist Huang Yuxing’s Sunrise embodies the vigour of florescent colours, which Huang utilizes to express the natural world that is less concerned with the artificial mimesis of landscape, focusing instead on the symbolism and metaphors within. Devoted to the process of creation itself, Huang Yuxing superimposes layer upon layer of acrylic and oil, emphasizing the textures and relationships created by the coalescing of colour and brushstroke. As such, the richness of his works lies in their dynamism as they transverse the boundary between the public and the private, the figurative and the abstract. Huang’s fascination for water, for example, and the numerous forms it can occupy, is an exploration not only of its physical mutability, but also its metaphysical nature. In the transfiguration of water to mist, bubbles or streams, one finds a metaphor for the coexistence of the eternal and the ephemeral, and in its boundless flow one finds a symbol for the unyielding passage of time.

     

    The current work, Sunrise, displays no less an attitude of cathartic release than the rest of Huang’s oeuvre. Across the canvas run strips of acidic pink and purple, as oval shapes bleed yellow and green, morphing sometimes into decorative curls and sometimes into the spirals of rippling water. One gets the faint impression of a rising sun refracted and reformed through multiple dimensions. In the symmetry of its undulations the work settles into a gentle rhythm of contraction and release, as if harnessing the cosmic energy of the star itself. Less a landscape and more a study of the relationships between colour, this work is a fantastic example of Huang’s masterly manipulation of form and reality.

     

    Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1916-19
    Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

     

    The historical context of Huang’s expressionism is rooted in the Cultural Revolution, infusing his work with a sense of liberation and evoking the dreamlike water scenes of Monet or Munch’s charged skies. Sunrise particularly showcases Huang’s ability to manipulate form and reality, using colour relationships to convey the sun’s cosmic energy, thus offering a study of colour interplay rather than a direct landscape representation. Armed with a visual language which aims to deepen and transform his subject matter, Huang works with the ferocity of adolescent rebellion and revelry. Building tension on the canvas with the juxtaposition and coupling of physiological and psychological elements, Huang’s 'structuralist architecture' i is a meditation on the expansive potential of the individual. As Huang said, ‘one’s history and its course are manipulated and controlled by so many things external to life", and bodily structures are the few things which 'can stand against such manipulation.' ii

     

    Edvard Munch, Anxiety, 1894
    Collection of the Munch Museum, Oslo

     

    Influenced by both Marlene Dumas and the traditional Chinese realist technique ‘gongbi zhongcai’ (工筆重彩), Huang’s paintings escape the confines of tradition, charged with an ardent desire to renew viewer perceptions of reality and unreality. In their swirling amalgamation of neon tones the viewer finds themselves transported into a cosmos of pure psychedelia, transfixed by a confusion of proportion and form. Minute objects are enlarged, as cells and pores undergo such immense magnification that they appear instead as landscapes, sometimes morphing into the contours of a human face, sometimes into the very swells and crevices of streaming rivers or erect mountains. In his hands, reality is manipulated and distorted beyond easy recognition.

     

    Born in 1975 Huang Yuxing graduated from the Mural Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2000, and currently lives and works in his hometown. He was the first guest artist at the Yuz Museum Project Room in 2015. In 2020, Almine Rech has announced the representation of the artist in the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom. Some of his notable recent solo exhibitions include Huang Yuxing (2022), An Absolute Power We Cannot Find (2022), and Heaps of Brocade and Ash (2021) at Almine Rech. His art has been highly sought after in the art market in recent years, marking him as one of the most accomplished contemporary artists in China. Huang was invited to collaborate with Louis Vuitton for their 2021 ‘Artycapucines’ collection, joining the likes of Urs Fischer, Tschabalala Self, Liu Wei, Henry Taylor, Jonas Wood, and Alex Israel, to introduce their innovative aesthetic visions to the brand. Huang’s first NFT project, Meta-morphic, was released online on 7 September 2022 and sold out within one minute of the launch.

     

     

    i Zhu Zhu, press release for ‘Alluvial’, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, October 2015, online

    ii Huang Yuxing, as quoted in Wu Sijie, ‘Huang Yuxing “And Ne Forthetedon Ná”’, Galerie Perrotin, 2016, online

    • Provenance

      Private Collection, Asia
      Private Collection
      Phillips, Hong Kong, 29 November 2021, lot 132
      Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Ж33

Sunrise

signed and dated ‘Huang Yuxing 16’ lower right
acrylic on canvas
100 x 150 cm. (39 3/8 x 59 in.)
Painted in 2016.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
HK$900,000 - 1,500,000 
€106,000-177,000
$115,000-192,000

Sold for HK$1,651,000

Contact Specialist

Angela Tian
Associate Specialist, Head of New Now & Design Sale
20th Century & Contemporary Art, Hong Kong
+852 2318 2058
AngelaTian@phillips.com

New Now & Design

Hong Kong Auction 26 November 2023