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Sunday 16 February

Huang Yuxing: Master of Fluorescent Rivers

Published on: 13 December 2024

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 6 minutes

In his monumental paintings, Huang Yuxing transforms Chinese pictorial traditions into explosions of fluorescent colors. His rivers and mountains pulse with supernatural energy, creating landscapes that transcend the boundaries between East and West, tradition and modernity.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, it’s time to talk about an artist who shatters pictorial conventions with the subtlety of a supernova in full bloom: Huang Yuxing, born in 1975 in Beijing. Here’s a painter who transforms the canvas into a battlefield where fluorescent colors dance a frenetic waltz with millennia-old Chinese tradition. It’s as if Kandinsky dropped acid in a Buddhist temple – and trust me, the result is absolutely hypnotic.

In his monumental paintings that can reach several meters in height, Huang Yuxing toys with our perceptions like a Zen master juggling lightsabers. His technique, rooted in traditional Chinese “Gongbi Zhongcai”, literally explodes under the assault of phosphorescent colors that would make a rave party look like a librarian’s meeting. But don’t be fooled; behind this chromatic debauchery lies a profound reflection on the very nature of our existence.

Take his series of rivers and mountains. Huang Yuxing develops a vision of time that would have made Henri Bergson smile in his grave. For the French philosopher, time was pure duration, a continuous flow impossible to slice into distinct moments. And what does our artist do? He throws us rivers that seem to flow from eternity, whirlpools of colors intertwining like moments fused in a cosmic consciousness. These rivers aren’t mere waterways; they’re visual metaphors for time itself, a time that flows inexorably while remaining eternally present.

His landscapes aren’t simple representations of nature – that would be too easy, too banal for a mind as tortured as his. No, Huang Yuxing offers us a visual meditation on the Buddhist concept of impermanence, the famous “anitya”. Each brushstroke, each layer of fluorescent color, tells the story of a world in perpetual flux. His mountains aren’t fixed in stone; they pulse, vibrate, seem to dissolve before our eyes like psychedelic candies in an ocean of pure consciousness.

The way he manipulates color is simply revolutionary. Imagine for a moment that Rothko decided to raid a fluorescent paint store after meditating for ten years in a Tibetan monastery. Huang opens his paint pots a week before using them, reducing their viscosity until they reach the perfect consistency. He’s a modern alchemist who transforms not lead into gold, but pictorial matter into pure visual energy. His canvases don’t just reflect light; they seem to generate it from within, as if every square centimeter were alive.

In his “Bubbles” series, the artist pushes his reflection on temporality and existence even further. These bubbles floating in his compositions aren’t mere geometric shapes but visual metaphors for our own ephemeral existence. It’s as if Parmenides, the ancient Greek philosopher obsessed with the immutability of being, found himself confronted with quantum reality, where everything is probability and change. Huang Yuxing’s bubbles are both there and not there, solid and fragile, eternal and instantaneous. They remind us that our existence is but a brief flicker in the vastness of the cosmos.

The way he treats space in his compositions is equally fascinating. He employs traditional Chinese “scattered point” perspective, creating environments that defy all Euclidean logic. It’s mental space rather than physical, a territory where the laws of Western perspective go elsewhere. In “Seven Treasure Pines”, he creates an entire cosmos on seven panels, each representing one of Buddhism’s treasures: coral, agate, pearl, gold, silver, shell, and turquoise. This monumental work isn’t just a demonstration of technical virtuosity; it’s a true pictorial cosmogony.

The influence of Zen Buddhism on his work is undeniable, but Huang Yuxing isn’t one to serve us a watered-down version of Eastern spirituality for Westerners craving exoticism. No, he takes these ancestral concepts and forces them into the 21st century, creating a head-on collision between tradition and modernity that produces sparks visible from light-years away. His paintings are like visual koans, those Zen riddles meant to short-circuit rational thought to lead us to a deeper understanding of reality.

What makes his work so relevant today is that it transcends the East-West divide. While so many contemporary Chinese artists merely play the card of exoticism or extreme Westernization, Huang Yuxing creates his own visual language. A language that speaks as much of Chinese pictorial tradition as of American abstract expressionism, as much of Zen Buddhism as of quantum physics. He doesn’t seek to reconcile these diverse influences; he lets them collide, creating something entirely new in the process.

His technique of layering colors, where he lets the paint rest for days before applying it, creates depth effects that are dizzying. The successive layers of pigments create chromatic abysses where the eye gets lost as in a black hole. It’s quantum painting, where each brushstroke exists simultaneously in multiple states, like Schrödinger’s cat in its box. This unique approach to pictorial matter isn’t a mere stylistic effect; it’s a true philosophy of painting.

Take, for instance, his “Mountain Layer” series, where he fuses traditional Chinese ink painting with the British landscape tradition. The result is stunning. The mountains seem to emerge from a psychedelic dream, their contours dissolving into waves of fluorescent colors that defy description. It’s as if Turner met a Chinese painting master in a parallel dimension where the laws of physics no longer apply.

His use of fluorescent colors isn’t a mere aesthetic whim. As he himself declared, “Fluorescent color is the color of our generation”. There is no such color system in traditional easel painting. It’s special, like a kind of vigorous vitality compressed or released. These colors are the visual expression of our era – an era of constant stimulation, artificial brightness, and augmented reality.

In his latest works, Huang Yuxing continues to explore the limits of what’s possible in painting. His landscapes become increasingly complex, with layers of color accumulating like geological strata, creating pictorial territories that seem to exist in multiple dimensions simultaneously. It’s as if each canvas were a window into a parallel universe where the laws of physics have been rewritten by a poet on acid.

His approach to nature is particularly revealing of his worldview. Unlike the Western tradition that places man above nature, or the Eastern tradition that sees man as part of nature, Huang Yuxing creates a third space where these distinctions no longer make sense. In his paintings, nature is neither a backdrop nor a mystical force but a field of energy in constant transformation.

Critics have often compared his work to that of Peter Doig, but this comparison doesn’t do justice to the originality of his vision. Where Doig explores the boundaries between memory and reality, Huang Yuxing tackles more fundamental questions about the very nature of existence. His paintings aren’t windows onto an imaginary world but portals to a larger and stranger reality than we could ever conceive.

His recent commercial success – with works regularly selling for millions of euros – might make one think he has found a winning formula and stuck to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each new series shows evolution, a desire to push the possibilities of painting further. He doesn’t just repeat what has worked; he continues to explore, experiment, and take risks.

Look at his recent series inspired by Wang Ximeng’s “A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains”, a masterpiece of the Northern Song Dynasty. Huang Yuxing doesn’t just reinterpret this classical work; he completely deconstructs it to extract its essence and rebuild it according to his own vision. The result is a series of paintings that are both a tribute to tradition and a radical declaration of independence.

So yes, you bunch of snobs, you can keep swooning over your minimalist conceptual installations or your post-post-modern performances. Meanwhile, Huang Yuxing will keep painting entire universes with his fluorescent colors, proving that painting isn’t dead – it’s just mutating into something stranger and more wonderful than we could have ever imagined. He is living proof that contemporary art can be deeply rooted in tradition while resolutely forward-looking, accessible yet complex, commercial yet deeply personal.

Reference(s)

HUANG Yuxing (1975)
First name: Yuxing
Last name: HUANG
Gender: Male
Nationalitie(s):

  • China

Age: 50 years old (2025)

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