English | Français

Sunday 16 February

Huang Jiannan: The Temple Merchant

Published on: 20 December 2024

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 5 minutes

Huang Jiannan, an artist claiming to bridge East and West, is a skillful illusionist manipulating the codes of traditional Chinese art and Western painting in an artistic masquerade that captivates collectors but betrays the authenticity of both traditions.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I’m going to tell you about Huang Jiannan, born in 1952, this Chinese artist who flaunts his title of “First-Class National Artist” like a peacock in a suburban garden. You know, the one juggling between oil painting and traditional ink like a clumsy waiter in a three-star restaurant.

Let’s start with his so-called fusion of East and West, his first artistic theme that gives me migraines every time I think about it. For nine years, he trekked 38,000 kilometers on foot across China, playing the modern hermit in search of artistic enlightenment. One might almost picture Friedrich Nietzsche on his philosophical walks in the mountains of Sils-Maria, except our Chinese friend was less in search of the Übermensch than a technique to boost the value of his works.

In reality, his compositions are more like a couple’s argument where neither listens to the other. Traditional Chinese elements—the verticality, the importance of emptiness, the fluidity of ink—awkwardly clash with Western techniques like impasto and gestural expressionism.

What he produces is nothing more than a superficial artistic hybrid. He rides the wave of Oriental exoticism like a teenager on TikTok. His landscapes are supposed to embody a synthesis of millennia-old Chinese pictorial tradition and the boldness of Western contemporary art. In reality, they resemble more a forced marriage between two traditions that would have preferred to stay single.

Michel Foucault spoke of “heterotopias” as spaces that simultaneously reflect and contest real spaces. Huang’s works are unintended heterotopias: they perfectly reflect the superficiality of the contemporary art market while pretending to transcend it.

The way he handles Chinese pictorial tradition is particularly problematic. He reduces it to a series of stylistic tics, stripped of their philosophical and spiritual substance. It’s like reducing Chinese calligraphy to mere wall decoration or seeing a sacred site turned into an amusement park. He empties traditional Chinese techniques of their spiritual and philosophical meaning, keeping only their decorative aspect, as if he were using a Buddhist sutra as wallpaper in a Las Vegas casino.

His second theme, his obsession with nature and landscape, deserves some attention. After all, he spent nine years trekking across China, like an Asian Caspar David Friedrich in search of the sublime. His landscapes are supposed to capture the essence of Chinese nature. In reality, they mostly capture the essence of the contemporary art market: flashy, superficially impressive, but fundamentally hollow. It’s as if someone had put a traditional Chinese landscape in a blender with an action painting and hit the “auction” button.

His landscape technique, which he claims is revolutionary, is nothing more than a clumsy attempt to merge American abstract expressionism with traditional Chinese painting. It’s like if Jackson Pollock and Zhang Daqian had an illegitimate child raised by Willem de Kooning. His “bold” brushstrokes resemble artistic convulsions more than genuine technical mastery. Even Clement Greenberg, in his most indulgent moments, would have struggled to find coherence in this pictorial chaos.

The way he handles color in his landscapes is particularly telling. In Chinese tradition, black ink was considered to contain all colors, a notion similar to what Kandinsky developed in his book “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”. But Huang uses color like a child with a new box of crayons: the brighter, the better.

His landscapes sorely lack what traditional Chinese artists called “yi”, the intention or spirit that gives life to a work. They are technically accomplished but spiritually dead, like embalmed bodies in a museum.

Gilles Deleuze spoke of the difference between “sterile repetition” and “creative repetition”. Huang’s work clearly belongs to the former category: a mechanical repetition of formulas proven successful in the market.

There’s something deeply ironic about his work. In Chinese tradition, landscape painting was a means of meditation, a way to connect with the Tao, the essence of the universe. In Huang’s case, it has become an exercise in style, a pictorial sleight of hand that impresses Western collectors craving exoticism and newly wealthy Chinese seeking cultural recognition.

Theodor Adorno would probably see in his work the perfect example of the cultural industry in the age of globalization. His works are produced like luxury goods, calibrated for an international market that wants something “contemporary” but not too much, “Oriental” but not too much either. It’s art for five-star hotel lobbies and multinational boardrooms. Huang serves his collectors exactly what they want, like a chef tailoring dishes to Western palates.

It must be acknowledged that he has mastered the codes of the contemporary art market. His works tick all the boxes: “innovative” mixed technique, “bold” cultural fusion, astronomical prices that make investors salivate. He even managed to get collected by the Thai royal family, as if that conferred any artistic legitimacy on his work.

His commercial success is undeniable. His works sell for prices that would make Van Gogh blush in his grave. But as Ad Reinhardt said, “Art is art. Everything else is everything else”. And Huang’s work definitely belongs to the “everything else” category.

He perfectly represents what Fredric Jameson called postmodern “pastiche”: an empty imitation of past styles, devoid of critical parody or true innovation.

The saddest part is perhaps how his success discredits genuine innovations in contemporary Chinese art. While the market fawns over his calculated blends, more authentic Chinese artists like Zhao Nengzhi struggle to gain recognition, even though Zhao, still little known in the West, is arguably one of the greatest painters of the new generation.

Huang Jiannan represents everything wrong with the contemporary art world: the primacy of marketing over creativity, the commercial over the artistic, appearance over essence. He is the perfect embodiment of what Theodor Adorno feared: the transformation of art into mere entertainment for the privileged classes.

Huang Jiannan is not so much an artist as a symptom of our times: an era where even the most sacred artistic traditions can be turned into consumer products for the ultra-rich. But perhaps we should thank him. By embodying so perfectly everything wrong with the contemporary art world, he helps us better understand what art should truly be. As a particularly eloquent counterexample, he shows us what not to do if we wish to preserve the authenticity of artistic expression.

Reference(s)

HUANG Jiannan (1952)
First name: Jiannan
Last name: HUANG
Gender: Male
Nationalitie(s):

  • China

Age: 73 years old (2025)

Follow me

ArtCritic

FREE
VIEW