Huang Rui ist ein Pionier der abstrakten Malerei in China. Er war Mitgründer der Stars-Gruppe und organisierte ihre erste unangemeldete Ausstellung im Jahr 1979, der Geburtsstunde chinesischer zeitgenössischer Kunst. Über flächige Darstellungen der Pekinger Höfe und Gassen fand er zu seiner eigenen Bildsprache: geometrische Abstraktionen, inspiriert vom Daodejing und I-Ging, und gestische Kompositionen auf der Basis traditioneller Tuschemalerei. Das Buch ist seine erste große Werkschau, die auch Skulpturen einbezieht und dabei besonderen Fokus auf die aktuelle Position des Künstlers legt, wenn er die Leinwand durch kreis- und mondförmige Einschnitte öffnet und die ganze Rahmenkonstruktion in seine Erforschung wirklicher und virtueller Räume einbezieht. Wie Jennifer Dorothy Lee in ihrem Essay schreibt: „Durch den Daoismus und die Texte der alten Gelehrten verwandelt sein Zeitverständnis die Materie, die Leinwand, die Ölfarbe. Der Daoismus erlaubt es Huang, das Material als spannungsvolle oder einander bekriegende Kräfte zu betrachten, die ihrerseits zu transformativen Prozessen führen … Seine Werke beschäftigen sich mit einer sich wandelnden Gegenwart.“

A LIVING BEING THAT CAN BREATHE
(Auszug aus dem Gespräch zwischen Huang Rui und Berenice Angremy)

Berenice Angremy: Most people would regard the I Ching merely as something ancient and traditional. But you turned the old into the new in your work. So you are superimposing the spatial relationship of the old and the new to present your contemporary consciousness in a dislocated way. In any case, you are pursuing the I Ching as a contemporary concept.

Huang Rui: Now, the first thing we should do as an artist, as opposed to a craftsman, is to figure out how much contemporaneity we have. We have a very contemporary understanding of nature, humanity, and the universe, for example, of astronomical geography, the movement of life and its emotional expression. Without contemporaneity, an artist is just an old man—just go on living and working, time waits for no one. Yet when an ancient man lives to the present, he can be contemporary if he realizes that he is travelling through time and space. If he uses the concept of time travelling, he has a contemporary practice. So there are two levels: one is the driving force of creation, and the other is rising from the past, as in those thoughts from the I Ching.

I basically oppose the attitude of most scholars interpreting the I Ching, because they believe the voice is from top to bottom conveyed through one’s own body. I don’t think so, as I’m bottom-up, hence a dissident. In fact, what the I Ching invented, as a matter of course, is reverse thinking, which helps you establish your own thinking. Therefore, the book is no longer what everybody thinks it is …

When I had not yet read the I Ching, I painted the order of space in Beijing, an aesthetics that dates back to the Yuan dynasty. After reading the I Ching, the contours of the location, or of the skies, were all highlighted. My concepts come from the life of the people. The square is solidity and the circle is imagination: a square can be a space of life, a private space, an exoskeleton that projects absolute ownership. The form of the circle can be externality, emotions, society, history, or anything. The space in between them is my breath, and the critical point of my creative practice …

B.A.: As you are focusing on abstraction, the development is clearly visible. You have taken a powerful next step; it really seems a new direction rather than a few different works.

H.R.: In the past two years, I have gone full circle. I thought it should have happened sooner. That is, when you take a complete turnaround and you stand at a spot higher than the original position, where you can see the past and you can also see a little bit of the future. This is an ideal position. In the recent two years, I started to have this feeling, knowing how to create and how to develop possibilities with both Dao and No-Dao (my coinage). When you have the Dao, you need to ascend and grasp reality. During No-Dao, you do not need to ascend, you are an empty object, floating freely.

B.A.: These works are also a way to grasp your environment, connecting the inside and the outside. The external environment could be history, politics, and social issues, all of which merge into your art.

H.R.: There are two layers of space in my recent works: I dig a hole in the canvas and hang it at a distance from the wall, so that the hole and the wall form a kind of perspective. This perspective is in opposition to the picture, or in line with it, but at the same time a contradiction, since it belongs to another dimension. The original painting is pulled outwards and thus becomes an installation, not merely a picture.

It is as if the painting becomes a living being that can breathe. Instead of something flat it also goes into the three-dimensional realm, and as it has two layers, it also enters the dimension of time. That’s what we call the fourth dimension. This is what I do, I don’t arrange everything in a fixed direction. I allow the possibility of movement and process, so that it can advance in the spatial dimension. So far, all the spaces I have created, in the Space-Structure and Space series, in installation or in sculpture, they are all three-dimensional. Now I focus on the fourth dimension: there is a feeling of how much it can provide, not clearly, but you know it is there beyond the picture plane. It produces a presence, it hints at vague imaginations. That makes me feel good, and I need to work harder along this way.

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In Zusammenarbeit mit Cornerstone Art