A Loving Brush With Fame

Daragh Moller provides an astute insight to the motivation and

skills of one of China's most eminent artists, Huang Youwei.

Huang's day starts late. Usually he surfaces around midday at the home he shares with wife Binbin and two children in the sleepy hamlet of Baimiao, Tongzhou District, just outside Beijing. It's a peaceful abode, meticulously maintained.

Huang, a water-colourist whose work enjoys high demand in China and overseas - one work was recently bought by a British royal for the priceless Royal Art Collection -   was born in Yueyan, Hunnan Province in 1965.  His paintings are now so in demand that whatever comes off his easel is usually already sold. Also known by the alias "Fisherman of Dong Ting Lake", he is not fussed by the heavy demand. Huang is very much a painter who sets his own agenda without being blasé about his fame.

His work is considered largely decorative and, simply, beautiful - appreciations that would not always guarantee sales in some art markets. But his creations strike a definite chord in Europe and the US as well as China. Buyers appreciate his aesthetic, seeing it as insightful, honest, raw, heartfelt and strong on meaning. Soft on the eye, and somehow even gentle on the heart, his photorealistic renditions are a sustained meditation on the infinite beauties offered by the natural world.

It is past midday. In the artist's studio, a clock ticks and goldfish shimmer. A bowl of roses, left to dry on a mantelpiece, sheds petals. A natural still life. A whiff of jasmine blends with wood smoke as the fireplace crackles. A skylight cut into the sloping roof drops a diagonal beam of sunshine on the flagstone floor.

A dog barks. The eye takes in an easel and artist's chair, a bowl of water and three cleaned brushes. A palette. Chinese window screens and ceiling beams and books on architecture, magazines and photographs. An unfinished painting …

On the softened roughness of the watercolour, a wet paintbrush touches on the surface but once. With confidence, not just a steady hand, assertive marks translate immediately into life: a bird, a pear, a berry, a leaf, a ray of light. Magical dabs of instant beauty.

The work is meditative as much as spiritual, and benefits from the natural world as its primary subject. The artist, in so doing, takes the narrative of the passage of time and places it at the heart of all he creates.

This is work that tells that life decays but is reborn and lives again. Time-honoured Beijing courtyards cast in dawn light, roofs overrun with enthusiastic summer weeds, bright and irrepressible. Half-open siheyuan doorways reveal rich and fertile life in concert with the worried lintel stones and scarred brickwork.

In a world devoid of people, the natural world is tamed. Urban flowers festoon with life and grow, uncluttered, clipped and weeded. Idealised. Hutongs are deserted but for the bright, steady gaze of a city cat - space free of the clutter of human habitation left to tell its own story. Idealized, and rearranged like personal memory, the image argues how space is occupied in life without us.

A bowl of water floats blossom leaves across its surface as warm light falls around it. Passed a thick and fecund rope of pink and lilac roses, the eye wanders through a doorway, down a passage, to a space dark and forbidding at its side.

Much as Buddhist doctrine enshrines life with the responsibilities of death, the work of Huang Youwei places death into the hands of life. The work expresses that life is beautiful precisely because it is fleeting, one moment piled on another moment passing, an end always drawn as a new beginning.

Central is the artist's use of light. As it falls, it captures and illustrates, the movement of time across the painting's uninterrupted narrative and says: that no matter what happens, nature remains unbroken. This light moves across the surface of the paintings, somehow literally, just as it moves convincingly in the mind's eye.

While the work is often photorealistic, it is so with artistic license. Edges blur with emotional rendering, colours over-tinted with the zeal of a lover's eye. The feel and sense of the subject, like a single rose amidst a white and purple rush of water, elevated to the stature of the divine. A lover working with a steady brush.

One can easily imagine the artist at work, the hours of his day spent walking the laneways of this emotional engagement. Resting before a half-open door, he waits for the light to move as the world turns, for life to shed a tear, a leaf, or still a cat's paw on a broken roof tile.

He waits for change.

The world of the artist's imagination does not remove people from the subject but instead imagines a still moment in time's arrow. It is as if this moment, launched from the artist's imagination to the crafted beauty of his page, is somehow positioned between the many other moments of human confluence and departure. The scene involves human disappearance. And it is the absence of these people that makes the beauty rare that in turn exposes the absent presence in all of nature.

At night, watching for the dawn, the artist paints. He conjures.

The story of a door concerns him. Browned with age, it is overgrown with new life. The swept-clean steps and greenery gradually overrun the artist's empty page. Light creeps beneath the door and imagines the secret garden within.

Light of day fully breaks across the sky and the artist lays down his brushes. He gazes intently at the scene he has created. He is satisfied, filled up, still in love with beautiful life. He sleeps.