TRG = Tabula Rasa Gallery

Huang Haiyan
Usually, it starts with an idea or an observation that appears almost randomly—something that suddenly comes into my mind in the form of an image. For example, A Room of Nothing but a Remote began with the image of a room containing nothing but a remote control. I had that image first, and only afterwards did I start asking myself why the room contained only a remote control. There must be other rooms containing other things, so why had all the remote controls been gathered together? At that point, it feels less like I am creating the room and more like I am encountering it. For me, most of the thinking comes afterwards. I may guide the direction of that thinking, but the meaning, description and metaphors are something I develop along the way. I write down similar ideas in a notebook so I don't forget them. I don't write very much—just a few words, mainly as a reminder. Once I've written something down, it's as if I've taken it out of my head, and I feel more relaxed.

I number them as well. At the moment, I have more than 170 of these titles, ideas and notes. When I make a concrete plan for my work, I edit and remove some of them. Even once an idea has been given a number, it isn't fixed. It is the reason why a work came into the world in the first place—the most fundamental and initial part of the process, but still very far from the end. Completing a painting involves many things that come later: translating the idea onto the canvas, deciding on the composition and form, working out the structure, and so on. When problems arise, I have to find ways to resolve them. In fact, many paintings end up looking very different from the way they first appeared in my mind. Some I faithfully and firmly reconstruct; others change as the ideas settle in my mind over time and through experience.

There is a significant influence. I can’t quite explain exactly how writing and literature have shaped my painting, but I know that, just as my love of painting naturally led me to paint, my love of literature inevitably led me to experiment with writing and eventually to study literature. I studied literature first and then went to art school, but the major choices I’ve made in life have generally been within my own control.

I’m at a point in my life now where I can describe, for myself, the differences between literature and painting. I’ve written scripts and academic papers, both of which I consider forms of writing, and I enjoy both very much. They are also closely connected to logic. When writing an academic paper, your sense of self becomes particularly strong. You know exactly what you are doing. When you eat or drink, your mind can drift, and the physical experience of swallowing and chewing can become very pronounced. Academic writing has something of the same quality: you are constantly chasing logic, while at the same time being carried along by it. There is something melancholic and intense about that.

Writing a script is different. You know there is an ending to the story, so you have to find your way there, but along the way you are constantly turning back and looking for new paths. Sometimes the piece of dialogue you were most proud of turns out to be wrong. The things you cannot obtain are sometimes what end up holding the whole story together.That experience of writing intensively is irreplaceable to me. It’s as though sentences are raining from the sky. After writing all night, the light from the sky outside the window slowly enters the room, quietly closing around the excitement you felt only moments before, when you finally found the exact word you were looking for.

I love that game of logic and language, but I don’t think about any of this when I paint. Painting exists on a completely different spectrum. You push things forward, spread them out, penetrate through them. My paintings only need to make sense to me. I can compress eighteen layers of something into a single place; everything is allowed. I think that for an artist who works with both language and visual forms, they don’t miss words while painting, or cling to images while writing. Precisely because they are capable of doing both, they simply own both.

Yes. For me, the title is the result, the answer, the entirety of the content.

There is no manual or ultimate codebook that explains these fixed correspondences, because my a might mean b today and c the next time. I might have to stop painting altogether before I could ever compile that kind of dictionary. But because I keep painting, these things remain active. They can even begin to organise themselves. There is a strong symbolic quality in my work, often because I take something that would normally require careful and serious depiction and turn it into a symbol. That also raises the question of how something should be depicted. There are many ways of representing the same thing, and I think carefully about how it should be handled, when it should appear, what role it should play, and what effect it should have. But I still allow intuition to guide those decisions. When you see something in my work that looks like a symbol, it has meaning for you because it is legible to you. But whether it is legible to me is not really important.

Huang Haiyan
My choice of colour is also largely intuitive. I suppose the non-intuitive moment comes when I put down a colour and then look at it to decide whether it feels “right” or “wrong”. But even that judgement seems to be based on intuition. Ultimately, I just go by what I like. The colours in my paintings vary quite a lot, so each painting can feel very different from the others. I don’t deliberately pursue that, but I don’t deliberately avoid it either just to create a sense of unity across a series. Sometimes the colour is decided from the beginning, and I have to hold onto it throughout the painting. In other works, the colour isn’t settled until the very end. In A Room of Nothing but a Remote, for example, I initially used other colours, but they never felt quite right. The work I’m painting at the moment does deliberately use colour to signify certain things. I keep feeling that green means an ending, while purple is a kind of narrator. But I can’t rely too heavily on that system. So I control its scope and timing, allowing colours to take on particular meanings only when and where they feel appropriate.

Huang Haiyan
I really hadn’t noticed that before. I just looked at my work, and even the painting currently in my studio seems to have the same tendency. I honestly didn’t expect them to look so orderly when placed together.

I find that quite interesting. Sometimes when I look through another artist’s portfolio, I have a similar feeling. I think artists as a group are really interesting because we reveal things about ourselves without necessarily meaning to. In everyday interactions, our relationships with one another are usually limited to what is visible. But artworks reveal much more private things. Everything is laid out in the open. Sometimes it can even feel slightly embarrassing, as though someone’s entire soul has been exposed in public. At the same time, that is what makes it so fascinating.

I think terms like “painting style” and “signature symbols” can actually diminish what is unique about an artist. They make it sound as though artists are always making deliberate, career-conscious choices according to some established pattern. The unconscious things that artists reveal through their work are precious. Things that cannot be fully explained or accounted for are especially valuable, particularly at a time like this.

Huang Haiyan
I am very much a person of the present, so it feels natural, almost inevitable, that I am influenced by what I encounter.The idea for this painting came to me in exactly the same way as the ideas for my other works. I suddenly thought: I want to paint four mountain peaks, with four idols standing on them, and call the painting Four Rebirths, Four Girl Group Debuts. Once I had decided on that, I realised it could very easily become a critical or condescending painting, so I deliberately wanted to make it non-critical.

The warning word “explosive” on the tanker originally belonged to the idea for another painting, but it fit perfectly here because in Chinese, you can describe someone as being “explosively famous.” I was on the road and saw a tanker in front of me. I immediately connected “online popularity” and this idea of “explosive popularity” with something dangerous, exciting, and even slightly arrogant. It could collapse at any moment. If it did, it would explode. Keeping your distance only makes it more conspicuous.Compared with other vehicles, a tanker marked “explosive” instinctively draws your attention. But you only have so much attention to spare...

There are many things like that: observation, insight, description. I knew very clearly that I wanted this painting to depict a road scene. A road scene and “rebirth” naturally belong together—cycles, time, speed, repetition. Even if you flattened all those things under a tyre, soaked them in asphalt and honey for ten days, then pulled them out and left them to dry, they would still become a transparent poem. I really love that sense of transparency. Air and transparency were exactly what this painting needed, so I placed the things that were waiting to be depicted around the edges. That is why it is dusk.

Painting is really interesting. You can think of yourself as the organiser of a game, allowing colour, line, meaning, logic, and symbols to play with one another within it.

I can tell that my work makes viewers curious. They often feel that there must be some kind of story behind what they are seeing. But some viewers are able to move beyond that instinct to “read” the painting and simply look at it. Afterwards, they might tell me that the painting reminded them of something from their own lives. Whenever I hear that, I’m deeply moved. It means that, through looking, they have created something of their own rather than simply trying to find the story behind the work. In a way, we are communicating through a kind of sign language, with each of us remaining a mystery to the other. I think that feeling of there being no single answer is wonderful. You really have to experience it yourself to understand.