Huang Gang

Private Collection, Taipei

This work is in a very good condition overall. There are no visible condition problems.
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Huang Gang's recent work is a fascinating combination of socialist and Buddhist iconography brought together as expressive abstractions that seem loaded with the weight of historical reflection.  Born in 1961, the artist was raised during the Cultural Revolution by parents whose professional influence may resonate in his work; his father was an historian of Chinese art, his mother an archeologist, and Huang took an early interest in traditional calligraphy.  He subsequently received his bachelor's degree from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1984 and his master's from the same institution in 1991.   Huang became interested in Tibetan art and culture during several visits to the region, and his compositions often deploy woodcuts of Tibetan Buddhist scriptures, mandalas, and the bold, graphic color language of black, white, red, and gold.  

Huang often applies acrylic and lacquer to his complicated surfaces, using loaded brushes to build the painting layer by layer, sometimes removing and repainting his previous work to create an opaque surface effect.  For the artist, this opacity evokes qualities of Song Dynasty landscape painting, and the sense of space he intends to create in his work derives from Chinese rather than Western aesthetics.  Huang considers Zao Wou-ki a pioneer in exploring these spatial conceptions anew in the language of abstraction, and he has acknowledged the influence of Zao's mark-making techniques and compositional methods in his own work.  And yet Huang's signature works, like the expansive Red Star (2005, Lot 46) on offer, bear few remaining traces of any debt to past masters. 

In Red Star, what once seemed in Huang's work an almost meditative practice has become a monumental artistic statement of dramatic intensity.  The work consists of three panels made from boards used for printing Buddhist scripture in Tibet and old leather boxes the artist collected there.  Huang sees these materials as carrying the history and energy of Tibetan religious culture.  In the middle panel, however, a brilliant red star, reminiscent of the revolutionary symbol, provides the work's central compositional focus. The work offers dramatic color contrasts, which seem to literally foreground the misprision of the socialist symbol within the universe of traditional Chinese aesthetics. Yet the surface of the work as a whole appears weathered, the star relegated to an historical past no less than the religious practices it only partially supplanted.  In this sense, the work appears to symbolize the passage of time and the complicated layering of competing world views; it is a collage of historical conflict compositionally juxtaposed but resolved by the overall surface effects.  Thus, despite its weathered patina, Red Star asserts itself as a work of contemporaneity. 

Similarly, in other works on offer Huang deploys the star - which has become a signature icon for the artist - with an even tighter composition.  Otherwise virtually identical, in one painting the bold star appears as the red figure on a ground of Tibetan woodblocks; in the other, the same ground plays the role of figure as expressive red over-painting delineates a star from the complicated surface beneath.  As Huang mixes his figures and grounds, he reflects upon ancient philosophy and its fate in the language of the contemporary avant-garde.