At the beginning of the 1980s, Huang Rui started searching for an approach towards abstraction that was grounded in his personal experience, one that would be more deeply abstract and rooted in the local context. Inspired by his hometown of Beijing, he created a series of works related to the architectural structure of traditional courtyard houses, or siheyuan. In 1983, Beijing was experiencing urban expansion and the modernization of its old city at an accelerated pace. Siheyuan, as a traditional architecture form that integrates yin and yang, wuxing (the five phases of Chinese philosophy), and Confucian hierarchies into spatial design, were facing challenges in the new era. In this context, Huang Rui reconsidered the relationship between the physical and spiritual space of siheyuan, creating a motif that he would return to repeatedly in subsequent works. In Courtyard Abstraction No. 1, the courtyard is simplified into a hollow rectangle, layered against the dividing lines of various color blocks and indicating the rigorous compositional logic behind the work. Meanwhile, the rectangle is tilted diagonally, implying a certain kind of instability. Just as how, in the process of modernization, traditional architecture has gradually become a disembodied historical symbol, Huang Rui uses the techniques of modernist abstraction and grey tones similar to the color of Beijing's hutong lanes to complete a spiritual, rather than physical, reconstruction of a siheyuan.

In addition to the insights trigged by his direct observation of these residential environments, Huang Rui gained further perspectives on spatial relationships by reading the Tao Te Ching and Book of Changes. He sums up his understanding of the logic of the Book of Changes as “Seeing the world/ the world seeing you/ you and the world interacting,” a situation in which positionality is not constant, but rather continuously in motion. Perhaps because of this viewpoint, works intervening in society or responding to social issues constitute another reoccurring thread in the artist’s practice. The pair of Hexagrams paintings on the east side of the New Gallery, which adopt the “Qián” (Heaven) and “Kūn” (Earth) trigrams, are a direct attempt by Huang Rui to transform the logic of yin and yang into a visual language. They resonate with more recent works such as Heaven, Earth, and Man, showing commonalities across two stages of the artist’s engagement with abstraction. During the “Space Structure” period, Huang Rui had not yet broken away from expressing relationships in space through specific shapes. In the aforementioned Hexagrams pieces, he arranged sets of equally sized squares into different configurations, comparatively analyzing two trigrams. In other works from around the same time, one can find similar expressive techniques at play, for example, the use of white squares and vermillion backgrounds, which suggests a sense of dialogue across the different pieces and activates another layer of visual energy that flows across his practice and within the exhibition space.

When compared with the “Space Structure” series, which Huang Rui started while living in China and then completed in Japan, the “Space” series more deeply bears the influence of his experiences living in Japan. In the summer of 1984, Huang Rui moved to Japan, a major life change that brought him into closer contact with the state of avant-garde art outside of China. He rented an old rice warehouse in Nara as his studio, where rice husks had been mixed into the material of the walls, and dark wooden slats served as pillars. The manner in which the site combined space, form, and function inspired Huang Rui to explore the connections between materials, content, and brushwork in painting. He would mix jute pulp with paint and then create his work on jute cloth. The rough grain of the jute created a strong textural effect on the surface of the images, while the impossible-to-control direction of the fiber brought a certain level of randomness to each work. In Space 85-10, Huang Rui juxtaposes smooth and rough sections of the painting's surface. The composition is at once moving and static, dark and light, indicating how paint can be used to express these two different orientations, and implying how energy may be generated and converted through the comparative logic of yin and yang. It is worth noting that the means of spatial expression in the “Space” series is not entirely divorced from representational structures; instead, its connection with figuration exists in a more obscure, discreet manner. Huang Rui has observed that Japanese houses are not merely an architectural form built around pillars, but also an embodiment of the idea of the “room” in Japanese aesthetics. The space between pillars constitutes not only a tensioned architectural space, but also a kind breathing space within the structure. Inspired by this idea, in the “Space” series, Huang Rui uses black paint to create a kind of frame within his images, placing the picture plane within another freer spiritual space.

In 2012, Huang Rui ended his lease on the Nara studio. Unable to ship all of the works stored there back to China, he ended up with no choice but to destroy some pieces from the “Space” series. Three years later, he would reconstruct the destroyed artworks using photographs and sketches for reference, creating the “Space (Recovery)” series in an echo of the original series, more than 30 years on. For each painting, an earlier image was revisited at a different time and location, adding the dimension of time as the work itself evolved into something resembling a performance piece. In two of these works, a circular hole is left empty in the center of image. Huang Rui was inspired to leave a blank space by the circular windows of Meigetsu-in temple in Kamakura, Japan. Since then, this element has frequently reappeared in his work. Like the temple’s window, known as the “Window of Enlightenment,” the hole opens up the flat space of the artwork, pointing towards the infinite vitality that lies beyond the canvas.

Huang Rui’s first exposure to ink wash painting can be traced back to his childhood, but he only started to properly create work in the medium in the 1980s during his sojourn in Japan. At this time, the Gutai art group and the avant-garde calligraphy movement were two leading currents within the Japanese art scene. In fact, many Gutai artists were deeply interested in avant-garde calligraphy and had a close relationship with Bokujinkai, an artist group dedicated to experimental calligraphic practice. Both the Gutai artist Kazuo Shiraga and avant-garde calligrapher Bakuzan Sakaki strongly influenced Huang Rui. He was particularly inspired by how the splashes, brushstrokes, and other techniques of avant- garde calligraphy could be harnessed to create visual abstraction. In his ink wash paintings, Huang Rui utilizes a pure form of the abstract to produce an intense visual impact. The left and right sides of each piece often function as separate compositions, opposed to each other yet seeking a kind of reconciliation and unity. The contrast and balance brought about by this approach brings to mind sixteenth century Japanese painter Tawara Sōtatsu’s masterpiece Wind God and Thunder God. By leaving blank space on the surface of his paintings, Huang Rui adds tension to the images as a whole, evoking Qing dynasty calligrapher Deng Shiru's words, “When white counts as black, strange charms emerge.” The image left on the paper is often what is beyond the brush.

Within Huang Rui’s long-term investigation of space and its possibilities, his large- scale ink paintings offered him a new way of exploring and occupying space. Unlike the interplay between oil paint and jute, in which the paint condenses on the surface of the fabric, ink soaks through the interior of rice paper, creating a relationship with the space on both the front and back sides of the paper. Huang Rui took advantage of this unique feature as he held exhibitions in Japan in the mid-1980s, adopting ink wash pieces as spatial dividers: he would hang the pieces within exhibition halls, using physical attributes of the ink and paper to add depth to the picture plane.

The dao, often translated as “way” in English, is a thread that connects much of Huang Rui’s art. Begun last year, the “Inside-out Dao” series is a focused exploration of this concept that also embodies several key themes of this exhibition. In the most direct sense, the dao of Huang’s work denotes the fundamental exploration of line and brushwork that forms his paintings, such as in the suite of works also titled Inside-out Dao, in which the artist employs geometric lines and ink-like splashes of paint. Through the wash of the paint, the kinetics of the brushwork, and the relationship between image and blankness, Huang constructs a new, three-dimensional space on the canvas. The title of the series also recalls a line in Tao Te Ching: “The Dao begot one. One begot two. Two begot three.” Since the 1980s, when author and screenwriter Ah Cheng introduced Huang Rui to Tao Te Ching, Daoist thought and culture have continued to exert influence on the artist’s work. In addition, the cosmological principle of the five elements and eight trigrams was an important theoretical buttress as Huang Rui turned from figurative to abstract painting. One suite of large-scale paintings here, which includes View of Heaven, View of Earth, and The Cosmic View, evokes a cosmic atmosphere that can be seen as an exuberant representation of Laozi’s famous adage: “Vague and obscure, an image lies within. Obscure and vague, an object lies within.”

Starting in the late 1970s, this sustained exploration of abstract painting has comprised a key path in the artist’s creative trajectory. To Huang Rui, abstraction is an aesthetic terrain that allows for greater imagination and thought. It evokes a certain freedom that cannot be expressed by language, an outpouring of natural, profound feelings. To paraphrase the artist, these artworks illustrate his full creative process, from conception to narrative, from practice to reflection, a projection of his dao of abstraction.