Huang Rui: Ways of Abstraction

From September 25 to December 19, 2021, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art presents Huang Rui: Ways of Abstraction. Since the late 1970s, Huang Rui (b. 1952, Beijing, lives and works in Beijing) has been active at the forefront of Chinese contemporary art as an artist and instigator, who notably co-organized the Stars Art Exhibition in 1979, where abstract art, including several paintings of his own, was openly exhibited for the first time in post-Revolution China. Huang Rui: Ways of Abstraction is the largest solo exhibition by the artist in recent years. Featuring more than 40 paintings and sculpture installations from the beginning of the artist’s career to the present day, this exhibition explores the language of abstraction and East Asian thoughts that have informed the artist’s practice for decades. Structured by five series—“Early Abstraction,” “Space,” “Space Structure,” “Experiments with Ink,” and “Installation Works”—works on view include the latest paintings created in 2021 in the “Heaven, Earth, Man” series, and exhibited for the first time, the oil paintings in the 2020 “Inside-out Dao” series. Huang Rui: Ways of Abstraction is curated by UCCA Director Philip Tinari with UCCA Assistant Curator Neil Zhang.

Infinite Space (1979) may be considered the first significant abstract work by Huang Rui. Works in the “Early Abstraction” section not only foreshadow the artist’s later shift towards a focus on the abstract, they also offer vivid testimony of the era’s artistic movements and social transformations. Huang Rui’s foray into abstraction intensified in the early 1980s, leading to works in the “Space Structure” series that examine the interaction between architectural form and spiritual space in the courtyard house of Beijing. Following his relocation to Japan in 1984, where he would live for the next fifteen years, Huang Rui began to explore the connections between materials, content, and brush work in painting, as inspired by the design philosophy of an old Japanese rice warehouse, resulting in the “Space” series. This series is echoed in the Space (Recovery) paintings made in 2015, in which the artist recreated according to photographs and sketches some of the “Space” paintings destroyed in his move back to China. During his time in Japan, Huang Rui also made a series of experiments with ink under the influence of Gutai and avant-garde calligraphy. 

The “Inside-out Dao” series draws from concepts integral to Huang Rui’s ways of abstraction in connection to the Chinese word dao. Captured by the exhibition title, the layers of meaning in dao denote the artist’s painterly methods, while alluding to the visual language of abstraction that serves as a manifesto for the artist’s ideological and political positions since the beginning of his career. Huang Rui’s abstract composition can be understood in terms of the dao in Taoism that depicts truth without direct representation or expression.

A recent series of large-scale paintings—Heaven, Earth, Man—represents a cosmic view that integrates the artist’s study of classical texts such as the Book of Changes and Zhuangzi’s teachings, underscored by the use of mixing jute into oil paint that creates a strong texture in contrast to the ink wash effect on the same canvas. Lastly, Huang Rui’s experimental approach to the language of abstraction is materialized in the installation works at this exhibition, which expands upon his use of ink, his consideration of the relationship between Taoist cosmology and urban ecology in the context of a global pandemic, and an alternative thread in his study of space and objects in sculpture form.

For this exhibition, UCCA will release a catalogue of the same title that features essays by the curator and critic Pi Li and professor at Columbia University John Rajchman, a conversation between Philip Tinari and Huang Rui, reproductions of all the exhibited works, and rare archival photographs and sketches dating from the “Stars” era to the present day. The catalogue is designed by He Hao and published by Zhejiang Photography Press.