Huang Rui | Abstraction | The Armory Show NYC 2019

HUANG RUI ABSTRACTION

HUANG RUI Born in Beijing, 1952

Huang Rui is one of China’s most highly regarded artists and one of the pivotal protagonists of the first non-conformist art groups to emerge from China in 1979. The Stars (Xing Xing 星星) Art Group, established in the late 70s following the end of the Cultural Revolution, used art to promote social ideologies and initiated some of the first free art expressions in the Post-Mao era. Huang Rui’s important Space Structure painting series produced in Beijing (1979-1984) took a radical artistic position of abstract form derived from Chinese ideas. As a leader of The Stars Group and The Stars Exhibition, Huang Rui was fundamental in the art movement that brought together like-minded artists such as, Wang Keping, Ma Desheng and Ai Wei Wei. This groundbreaking group of amateur artists was the first publicly active art collective to protest government censorship after the Cultural Revolution. Before his involvement in this group, Huang was one of the founders of the underground literature and poetry magazine, Today (今天), with Bei Dao and Mang Ke. Poetry was a way to express themselves when expression in the form of painting was unavailable. Huang Rui is an artist that has at once the ability to combine extreme intellect with a highly sensitive and personal approach. His works are finely crafted and meticulously finished. Within a minimalist exterior there hides mountains of meanings and connotations stemming from ancient Chinese philosophy, modern-day political hypocrisy or current society’s middling obsessions.

-Katie de Tilly, Director 10 Chancery Lane Gallery

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CONSTRUCTING ABSTRACTION: THE EARLY WORK OF HUANG RUI - THOMAS J. BERGHUIS

To many people in China and across the world, Huang Rui is synonymous with the Stars Group of 1979-1984. In 1979, Huang Rui, together with Ma Desheng, became the primary founders of the Stars Painting Association (xingxing huapai). Bringing together a group of artists from around Beijing, the Stars became known for organizing their first group exhibition on the gates of the China Art Gallery in Beijing, now the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC). The exhibition opened on September 27, just days before the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, a day when members of the Stars joined a protest movement at Xidan calling for political democracy and artistic freedom. Huang Rui has been an advocate for individual expression in China. In 1976 Huang Rui wrote a politically subversive poem that was published in 1978 in Today magazine (Jintian今天), when Huang Rui became one of the founders as art editor.

In 1979, Huang Rui produced a series of paintings at the Old Summer Palace, Yuanmingyuan, in Beijing. The series of three paintings represent the ruins of the ‘Western Mansions’ (xiyang lou) at the Old Summer Palace, which were commissioned by the Qianlong Emperor (1711-1799) and largely designed by the Italian Jesuit priest Guiseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) during his time in China, from 1715 to his death in 1766. In 1860 the Old Summer Palace was looted and burned by joint British and French forces, leaving the palace in ruins. In his painting Huang Rui moves from the actual structure of the ruins in the first painting, Yuanmingyuan: Last Testament, to their casting of shadows in the second painting, Yuanmingyuan: Rebirth, to finally their representation as a hand coming out of the ground grasping the moon in Yuanmingyuan: Funeral. These paintings represent a role for the future, looking at the rebirth of China after the Cultural Revolution. In the second painting, Yuanmingyuan: Rebirth, the cast shadows form what looks like wrapped figures and human sculptures, which will become important references for performance artists working in the second half of the 1980s. On September 27, 1979, the Yuanmingyuan paintings were featured in the First Stars Exhibition at the gates outside the China Art Gallery.

After 1979 Huang Rui would paint a series of cubist paintings of everyday life in Beijing, including the painting Democracy Wall (1981), representing the poets, artists and intellectuals that joined the Democracy Wall movement at Xidan, Beijing, on October 1, 1979. For these works Huang Rui made use of collage, consisting of texts and images from newspapers and magazines of the time, which were cut and pasted on the canvas to make the outlines of the figures and painted over with oil paint. At the time that Huang Rui made these paintings his thinking was about the rapidly changing urban and social environment of Beijing, altering the city landscape of Beijing in a way that was previously deemed impossible. The result can be seen in the paintings Seamstresses in a Street Production Unit and Girl Washing Clothes, both of which were painted in 1980.

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Huang Rui relates how he “wanted to find a spiritual presence through the environment,” with this “spiritual presence” becoming a “painting method.”1 Each of the colors further represents a sentiment and a spiritual presence in the artist life and the life of people in China coming out of the Cultural Revolution. The red represents the Cultural Revolution and the grey represents the color of childhood and dealing with ‘the story of Beijing.’ Red becomes ‘more political, linking the red walls of the Forbidden City to the Mao Zedong era.”2 For Huang the creative process becomes to render these colors in abstract form, something that would have an impact on other artists in China as well. These include the way in which Huang Rui started to paint the silhouettes of people in paintings such as Street Corner (1980) or Courtyard Story (1983-2009).

These early paintings by Huang Rui could be linked to paintings of other artists painting in the late 1980s, including Wang Guangyi in Beijing and Geng Jianyi in Hangzhou. With Huang Rui, a new language of Chinese art emerges that is based on spiritual presence in painting and the subject under rapid economic and social change in China. This language further extends into an important movement of abstraction in China during the course of the first half of the 1980s. Huang Rui’s first abstraction comes in the form of the painting, Infinite Space (1979), which shows references to Wassily Kandinsky in it its use of line and color composition. In 1983 the work of Picasso further inspired Huang Rui, after seeing an exhibition of his in Beijing. By late 1983, Huang Rui would, however, embark on a series of paintings that completely altered the perspective on abstraction in China. Previously, abstraction had largely been the focus of paintings by artists working in both ink and oil. This can also been seen in works of Zhang Wei, another important artist during this period and a member of the No Name (Wuming) Group, an artist group active in Beijing during the 1970s and early 1980s.

For Zhang Wei and other artists during this time, abstraction becomes an important means of selfexpression. These artists began to combine ink-wash, calligraphy and even “stage design” from Beijing and other forms of opera in their work, thereby creating new forms of abstract painting.3 Huang Rui, on the other hand, began painting a series of abstract paintings known as the Space Structure series, which render the city environment in a combination of Chinese divination (feng shui) and the artist making use of the Book of Chances (Yijing/I-Qing易經) to create maps of the ancient capital of Beijing. This series provides the basis for the current essay, which examines the significance of abstraction in China through the works of Huang Rui created in 1983 and 1984. This requires a definition in the Chinese language that best describes the role of abstraction, which can perhaps best be described as “xingtai” and “xingzhuang,” understood here as the state and appearance of abstract form.

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Kyoto Image No. 25 1998 Mixed media 68 x 90.5 cm (27” x 36”) 6

Kyoto Image No. 18 1998 Mixed media 103 x 145 cm (41” x 57”) 7

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Untitled 1985 Ink on paper 137 x 411 cm (54” x 162”) 9

Yellow No. 6 1991 Oil on canvas 72.5 x 60.5 cm (29” x 24”) 10

Blue Abstraction 1995 Oil on canvas 129.5 x 89 cm (51” x 35”) 11

Grey Abstraction 1995 Oil on canvas 65.5 x 53.5 cm (26” x 21”) 12

Purple No.4 1991 Oil on canvas 65 x 53 cm (26” x 21”) 13

Yellow Abstraction 1995 Oil on canvas 145 x 102 cm (57” x 40”) 14

Yellow No. 3 1991 Oil on canvas 65 x 50 cm (26” x 20”)

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White and White Colour No.6 1991 Oil on canvas 162 x 130 cm (64” x 51”) 16

Purple No. 6 1991 Oil on canvas 91 x 73 cm (36” x 29”)

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Citizens 1989 Oil on canvas 142 x 100 cm (56” x 40”)

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UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

WANG KEPING, ELLE AILES, 2011, BIRCH, 47.5 X 37 X 22 CM (19” X 15” X 9”)

WANG KEPING STARS FOREVER STARS MARCH 19 - MAY 11, 2019

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