YIRI ARTS presents Huang Qi-You's first solo exhibition in Taiwan titled, "The Bright Moon is High up."
The exhibition title, suggests an intuitive assumption that must be related to natural perception. Although the title is taken from one of Qi-You's paintings, a feeling of incongruity may arise when we look closely at his work, wherein the visual elements can be found contrasting with that of traditional oriental painting. I, therefore, call his paintings a private landscape of the "Uncanny".
This young artist loves nature and was born in the countryside. He reveals a novel category of paintings in this series. His works belong neither to the genre of the traditional romantic landscapes that celebrate the sublime and beautiful images of nature nor to modernity. Qi-You emphasises the painting itself, focusing on the composition and deliberately combining the imagination of personal wanderings in the wilderness with the mythical stories of time and space. Through the conceptual form of oriental landscape painting, Qi-You creates a painterly language that depicts a distinct inner penetration.
Huang's characters are often alone and absurd, and play a grotesque plot competently. The two large paintings - 'Test Gun' and 'Frightened Bird' - present viewers with absurd events that militate against common sense. Whether it is birds falling in pairs or a shooter targeting the earth, his paintings always make us fall upwards into the clouds and mists and see the infinite imagination of humanity in nature.
There are similar expressions in his smaller works. Extraordinary natural phenomena and divergent creatures run through the central axis of the works. Qi-you uses his seemingly casual but deliberately chosen visual language to create a powerful narrative in his paintings.
Suppose it is said that human mythology is created to explain unexplainable phenomena. If so, Qi-you is undoubtedly creating a novel "post-mythical" narrative style. Reading Qi-you's paintings is like taking a secret path, visiting the unknown nature deep in everyone's heart, and exploring endless possibilities.
