Thursday, June 26, 2014, 6:00 PM
Leigh Wen Fine Art
548 W 28th St Suite 636, New York, New York 10001

Wanwan Lei Projects is pleased to present its first solo exhibition with Taiwanese born, Brooklyn based artist Huang Hai-Hsin. Huang’s deeply psychological and perceptive works distill elements from everyday scenes, and reanimate them in wonderfully twisted arrangements of humor, awkwardness and felt imagination uniquely conducive to painting. These small, curious pockets of narratives expand and implode without consideration for resolution, and never lose touch with their roots in observation and reality.

Huang cites Luc Tuymans, Balthus, Munch and Hopper as critical inspirations, and employs a striking palette that is often exaggeratedly saturated and somewhat jarring. Her early works were influenced by source images such as vintage photograph and digitally compressed online thumbnails; she later abandoned her attempt to simulate the ghostly haze of aged photos with paint, and her newest work is a bright suite of seemingly simple moments, articulated with brash and decidedly in-focus brush strokes. They document the plentiful, often overlooked possibilities of absurdity that make up and enliven modern society, a world that is no longer sensible to be measured against one continuous frame of logic.

Household plants in her paintings (exotic and otherwise) boast solid, weighty leaves and bodies, while their weak and translucent ceramic containers are sometimes reduced to sheets of sheer, flat washes beneath a hovering rim. Leisurely butterflies flutter about these flower-less, indoor canopies. ln “Field Trip”, a clumsy queue of Simpsons-yellow, slightly mad tourist is linked by arms in the shape and scale of elephant trunks as it charges into a forest of potted flora. A group of birds approaching the snowy cap of Mount Fuji supervises this frenzy of weird elbows, domesticated aloe vera and pink tiles smashing against each other. Each person is stifling the eyes of someone directly in front as if to ensure the enjoyment of a surprise, so perhaps the last one in line is the winner of the most informed vantage point, comparable to that of the viewer.

For more information about the event, please visit:
http://now-events.net/