ABOUT
@bu_graphicdesign
@bostonpainting
@pmp.bu
@bostonsculpture
@buvisualnarrative
he/him
Huakai Chen
As an artist, I explore the overwhelmingness of confronting socio-political issues in China from an individual perspective, through the combination of oil painting, calligraphy, photo transfers, and found materials. These feelings derive from my own family history with governmental control, the tragic domestic news I read online every day, and the difficulty in expressing these issues under censorship. The multiplicity of visual languages in my work speaks to the impossibility and stress of communicating my intentions and becomes evidence of the endurance of the artist.
The End Of The Road is my most recent painting. In this wall-sized piece, I integrate the direct marks of painting and calligraphy with the indirect marks of woodcut print transferred onto the canvas’s surface. With the density of visual information rendered in muted palettes, the illegible text turns into deep and low murmurs of distress. My use of repetition recreates these feelings visually, from the application of material to the formats of individual pieces. I regard each repeated action as an attempt to realize the intangible and prolong the ephemeral. In addition, I build up multiple semi-transparent layers of color to interrupt legibility. As a result, the space in my paintings invites viewers to enter, yet rejects them by challenging legibility at the same time.
The scale of my artwork exists in two extremes—either as big as architecture or as small as a sheet of paper. I want to remind the audience of scale relationships: between their own bodies, the scale of art, and the problems within society today. I hope my viewer, like me, is in search of a form, reaches out to it, recognizes more than what they initially see, and eventually gets lost in the experience of perception.
Oil on panel, 12 × 9 in.
Oil and papier-mâché on panel, 12 × 9 in.
Oil and laser-print transfer on panel, 12 × 9 in.
Oil and laser print transfer on canvas, 10 × 12 × 2½ ft.
Ink, napkins and joss paper ashes on canvas, 140 × 22 × 156 in.