,Oil on canvas,180x130cm,2008.jpg)
The schema of Huang Hancheng’s work draws directly from his experiences of living in an urban contemporary environment. He paints scenes of urban interaction- women chatting together on the street, people engaged in conversations on their mobile phones, consuming, commuting. He captures an immediacy as a photographer might and freezes moments of seeming insignificance, but moments that are familiar to us, that we have acted out time and time again.
He presents the viewer the speed and rhythm of a rushed, modern society, reflecting the time-pressed psychological state of our society upon a canvas. The vivid light and brightness of colour with which the subjects in his paintings are depicted helps to convey a rawness, as if the image itself is a recent imprint upon our memory of scenes just witnessed. The impressions we are left with are those of a lost society, of people facing their own pains, and trying to make their own choices. But they are choices framed by the parameters of modernity, imbuing the experience with anxiety and tension. The use of newspaper and text in his previous oeuvre add a further layer to understanding his paintings, both literal and metaphoric, revealing contemporary society’s dependence on media and also the prism through which we view ourselves and create our identity.
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