Huang Dan was born in Guanxi, China, in 1979 and graduated with a BA at at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Since 2006, she has taken her contemplations of...
Huang Dan was born in Guanxi, China, in 1979 and graduated with a BA at at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Since 2006, she has taken her contemplations of landscapes, animals and humans across Greater China, with a particular emphasis on Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing, Korea, and Hong Kong.
Children, horses and acrobats are often the artist’s motif, carefully positioned in a natural world with expanses of dream-like azure water, sinewy trees and black skies. Huang Dan describes the horse in the language of classical Chinese painting. The horse is “stable as a mountain, and the horse's eyes are as clear water. Painting a horse is like painting an animal's "landscape." Children are often caught in an unguarded moment of serene inactivity. The viewer’s subconscious reflex is to project his or her own emotions onto the scene to fill the apparent emotional void.
The simplicity of Huang Dan’s works is manifested most clearly in her sparing use of colour, offering the viewer clean signature shades of a cold blue and hot orange, black and white. “The colours are becoming even more simple. Maybe in the end it will just be black and white. And then I may turn away from black and white and lead us into a world of chaos…” She describes the simplicity in the context of a half way stage between full, vibrant representation and the portrayal of nothingness. “A process from much, to half, to less… to none.”
Huang Dan pushes on her impressionist instinct of stripping away extraneity, further reducing colours and forms to focus on the essentials. Her newest paintings of the pine and pine needles affirm the continuation of her journey towards the core of our lives. Where impressionism softened the lines and blurred the contours of newly industrialized life, Huang Dan takes the philosophy a stage further, defining lines and angles of physicality, whilst leaving a tinge of emptiness in expressions, and removing background details entirely.