对话 | 黄娟：“生” “搬 ” “硬” “造”

L: There is a popular saying in the field of painting: reality in China is already so surreal that painters feel powerless — it becomes very difficult to create work that is more forceful or more absurd than reality itself. What do you make of this view? Or more broadly, how do you understand the relationship between painting and reality?

Huang Juan: My own relationship with painting is closer to a spontaneous response to daily life. The surreal quality of reality ignites my desire to paint, and in that process, something else tends to emerge, something that doesn't directly correspond to reality, yet remains vivid, and sometimes becomes almost unrecognizable. I find that quite interesting.

L: In your paintings, there are many personal expressions that often manifest in the form of symbols. They can appear quite cryptic, and without your own interpretation, people may not be able to identify them. Does that matter to you? Does it affect how audiences understand and receive the work? Is this ambiguity and vagueness something deliberate?

Huang Juan: The ambiguity and vagueness are deliberate. That's also why, in new works over the past two years, I've been gradually clearing away the more readable parts of the picture. I'd rather painting preserve its ancient mode of being looked at: the feelings conveyed from color, brushstroke, and symbolic traces to another person. Understanding doesn't have to align with the painter's intention, and painting has never really had the function of explanation. If a limited amount of information, combined with a limited amount of time spent with a work, can bring viewers into some kind of universal experience, or into their own distinct ones, that's very hard to achieve. I want to try.

L: Your recent work has become more structured and geometric, and also more abstract. You've said that the shift over these past two years has involved a great deal of subtraction, simplifying what used to be overly complex narratives and expressions. What was the thinking behind this? What did you remove, and what did you strengthen?

Huang Juan: What often moves me to paint is emotion, but the actual process of painting is about breaking down the various causes that gave rise to that emotion. So the picture tends to have a strongly structural character, working backwards, like a detective unraveling clues. But the result left on the surface, I still want it to land on a moment of immediate feeling. So the narrative elements have decreased, while the structural and incidental qualities have increased.

L: Earlier in your practice you were making abstract paintings. What brought about the change in direction?

Huang Juan: The logic of my earliest paintings was close to classical abstraction, but after two or three years I gradually couldn't continue. I realized that way of working wasn't forming a good relationship with the concrete changes in my life. I needed there to be some balance or dissolution between the two. The first figurative content to appear in my work came during a period when things in my personal life were going out of control and I couldn't cope. It was something close to the most primitive form of keeping a diary, one or two paintings a day. The time spent facing a blank surface could help me process some of what I was feeling, and it felt honest, and safe. That process lasted a year or two.

L: Why do you set time constraints for your practice? What do time and speed mean to you?

Huang Juan: Strictly speaking, it isn't really setting constraints. It's more that I've come to know myself better. The longer something takes, the more verbose and hesitant it becomes. I often feel that after a painting is finished, when I look back at it, it's a bit like observing something that exists in the world. It no longer belongs to me. I'm sharing it. The relationship between the brain, the picture surface, and the materials working together within a short span of time is something I find genuinely puzzling, and very curious. How does that collaboration actually happen? It's quite intuitive, not something that can be explained.

L: Your work uses a variety of materials, and you also pursue a light, thin visual effect. What is the relationship between these materials, this visual quality, and your subject matter?

Huang Juan: The use of different materials is connected to the large amount of work I made on paper in earlier years. I also paint without sketches or any concept of composition. I just find a place that feels right and begin. So more improvisational materials like charcoal, pastel, and watercolor feel more natural to me. I'm also more attuned to the quick, expressive quality of simple drawing or semi-abstract communication, and negative space has become increasingly important. So the sense of breath I find on paper, I want that not to disappear on canvas, and even when I use acrylic in places it remains quite thin and translucent.

L: Recognizable symbols frequently appear in your work, but they often repeat in ways that form an abstract structure. How does that structure emerge during the process of making?

Huang Juan: The reasons for repeating symbolic structures vary. Sometimes it's because an emotion is pressing and difficult to dissolve. Sometimes it's a formal consideration. Sometimes it's more like a compulsive need for order. It depends on the specific situation.

L: Your works don't read as unified wholes. They often appear as clusters of very different textures, colors, and treatments placed alongside one another. Is this deliberate?

Huang Juan: It may be related to the way I structure differences in reality. Sometimes it's specific people, events, or things; sometimes it's emotional fragments; sometimes it's an unconscious response. It's a temporary construction of the general outline of reality, or an abstract understanding of it. You could call it deliberate, or you could say it's simply what this way of working produces.

L: What appears most often in your pictures is a kind of mixed, composite grey. What does that tonal quality mean to you?

Huang Juan: Pure colors are there too. Certain colors I've decided on, I don't want to muddy, and in fact I'd rather they remain vivid. Color tendencies are also fluid and can vary quite significantly from work to work. Sometimes the feeling is quite light and gentle.

L: Is your practice research-based? How does research get translated into work, or reflected within it?

Huang Juan: In a sense, yes, but it feels more like something that just happens in daily life, appearing in my life and in my mind, and then I start to puzzle over the logic inside it. Life is fragmentary, but the hidden threads are systematic. The absurdity isn't accidental. There's always some connection. That state of turning things over is probably what the translation looks like.

L: How do these more abstract paintings construct a sense of the real?

Huang Juan: Semi-abstract, really. The pictures still contain recognizable figurative content, but handled in a more abstract way than a few years ago, or you could say they've integrated something from my earliest abstract paintings, made more opaque. These faintly recognizable symbols are a bit like trying to understand a designed flag: there's a totem, a symbol, the history or ambition of a group. Also a bit like a limerick. And I hope the language has been pushed forward.

L: In your painting, which traditions have been decisive influences? Which artists have affected you?

Huang Juan: I'm not sure I can speak well about painting traditions, but I'm drawn to things that are unassuming. I love looking at Paul Klee's paintings. What attracts me especially is the natural, spiritual quality in his work, something that many artists don't have. But actually I prefer watching films. I tend to spend a long time immersed in a certain atmosphere or narrative before I try to understand the director's structural approach and intentions.