On the afternoon of October 25, artist Huang Yuxing’s 30-year painting retrospective exhibition “Under the Sky” opened grandly at the Long Museum (West Bund). The exhibition is curated by Lu Mingjun, who breaks the clues of time and organizes the exhibition according to the"Light", "Country", "Island", "Carnival" and "World"The five themes display Huang Yuxing's early and later works side by side, allowing viewers to display the artist's perception, imagination and introspection in a more three-dimensional and dynamic way. Liang Chen designed the exhibition hall space.

As one of China's representative artists born in the 1970s, this exhibition presents Huang Yuxing's creative span of more than thirty years, from paper sketches in high school, graduation creations in college, to his recent painting attempt "Construction - A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains" 》. The types of works include the artist's most representative oil paintings, manuscripts, photos, sculptures, archival documents exhibited for the first time, and even commemorative objects collected by him. From them, we can see an artist's growth process and his message to the world. A different perspective.
 

Curator Lu Mingjun explained in the preface to the exhibition: In the summer of 1996, Huang Yuxing happily received the admission notice from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, but this did not alleviate his long-standing self-doubt and anxiety about growth. In order to get rid of this predicament, he traveled to Tibet many times with the intention of temporarily changing his life. During his time in Lhasa, in addition to painting, he even worked as a lama for a period of time, studying Buddhism daily and participating in spiritual rituals... This not only released his physical and mental anxiety, but more importantly, from then on, he became more aware of the world and the universe. Everything, especially the self, has a new understanding.

After returning to Beijing, Huang Yuxing successively created a series of works with expressionist and fauvist overtones. Most of these works take the human body as the subject matter, and the pictures are all filled with a dark, depressive, strange and uninhibited mood. This is certainly his preliminary exploration of painting (visual and conceptual) itself (such as about Mondrian, Modi (such as Riani and Chagall's studies), but for him, how to face his own heresy and express his innermost thoughts is the real driving force of painting.

About ten years later, a new "fluorescent" series "suddenly" appeared. The mutated landscapes and mountains have replaced the exaggerated bodies and portraits, and they have changed from the gloom and dullness of the past to a luminous, mottled and confusing theme and style. This seems to be a break, but in fact it is still Huang Yuxing's self-examination and expression: "Under the sky, you and I are all living beings."

Lu Mingjun believes: "Religion and spirituality constitute a hidden thread of expression in Huang Yuxing's paintings."

From Huang Yuxing's early creations, we can feel the artist's extraordinary sensitivity, as well as his own confusion and anger. But his later creations obviously eased the tense relationship with real life, and finally sublimated to the realm of "looking up at the vastness of the universe and looking down at the prosperity of categories" as Wang Xizhi said in "Lanting Preface", and realized the world view and worldview of Eastern humanities. The view of the universe thus distanced his creations aesthetically from those of his contemporaries. It is this religious and spiritual quality that constitutes the core of this exhibition. In short, this exhibitionIt allows us to see the unknown side of Huang Yuxing, and also allows us to fully understand his unique outlook on life and creation."

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