Exhibitions
Pin-Ling Huang - Unnamed Land

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未名之地 新聞稿.pdf

Dates|2019. 11. 16 - 2019. 12. 28
Reception|2019. 11. 16 (Sat.) 16:00
Venue|galerie nichido Taipei

galerie nichido Taipei is pleased to present solo exhibition “Unnamed Land” of artist Pin-Ling Huang.Huang Pin-ling`s works focus mainly on scenery painting. These sceneries come from places she has visited, or images that she has seen before. She internalizes and blends the fragments of memories together, and uses colors and brushes to further pile up and sort out various lines and textures which we see in her final artworks. By using a great amount of white or by leaving parts of the canvas blank, the artist is able to create different layers of relationships and details upon a flat surface, inviting the viewer to experience the dimension between reality and imagination. Not only do these imaginary sceneries convey visual feelings, but they also endeavor to express how one could face their inner-scenery calmly and relocate their own position whenever being stuck within the dilemma of reality and imagination.


Artwork Statement / Pin-Ling Huang
Painting as a form of Memory

“We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.” - John Berger, Bento's Sketchbook

Historically, painting has long been considered the representation of what we see which forms the subjects of paintings. Seeing painting as a form of documentation means that we record feelings that otherwise would stay invisible if we simply tried to represent the visible.

Such visual documentation functions as the archive of our visual experiences. Through lenses, it accurately “remembers” the visible by capturing images of the subject developed on pewter plates. If painting is a technique to preserve fragmented memories, painters are just like cameras, whose eyes (lenses) capture the images of the subject developed in the brain (pewter plates), before being contaminated by the painters’ touch. The process is just like photography. The difference is that painters engage with emotions and memories while developing the images. Although what is painted is no longer what we saw, it stays true to the abstract perception of the painter.


In my paintings I overlap the visual experiences I have in my personal life memories , continuously capturing the abstract perception after ‘seeing’ , as if creating multiple exposures on the films in my brain. For me, re-examining the sceneries that I have seen, running back and forth to my memories, is about interlacing time and space. The previous memories and the new memories overlap with each other, forming a place where I can store my thoughts but that has no name.

A Dreamland beyond the Shell: Landscape in the Painting by Huang Pin-Ling
Text/Nobuo Takamori

Is it possible to weave the consciousness and emotion in one’s brain into scenery? If landscape is in flux, does this explain how the consciousness shimmers through the crevices along the journey and the passage of time? What Huang Pin-Ling attempts with her paintbrush is precisely to answer the vague question above.

Anyone who encounters paintings by Huang Pin-Ling for the first time always and inevitably comes to the immediate cognition that what unfold before the eyes are landscape pieces one after another. However, it is through the motivation of curiosity and by trying to pry into the origin of the landscapes that one suddenly realizes most of the paintings which seemingly originate from some real landscape actually come from the artist’s dream world inside her brain. According to Jungian psychology, due to modernization, humans lost ancient people’s ability to perceive the world, including the ability of “participation mystique”. In Carl Jung’s view, modern man still could expand the world of unconsciousness through the narratives of dream. Yet does there exist an ability of iconographical depiction that can reflect “dream landscape”?

The landscape world depicted by Huang Pin-Ling looks sometimes like a tranquil snow field and other times a suspended space-time rapidly flashing before the window. The changes in these landscapes might partially result from changes in the external environment around the artist. For example: nuanced changes in terms of the palette and the brushwork following transitions in the external studio scene. Yet, the changes more often directly originate from the artist’s emotion in the brain. The experience of studying in Paris made Huang Pin-Ling gradually advanced toward her current creative path. Meanwhile, the Parisian living environment somehow determined the genesis of these works. The isolation felt from studying abroad forced the artist with a sensitive nature to be confined within a space shaped by her mind and thoughts. The relatively costly material fee necessitated Huang Pin-Ling to start painting on a blank canvas only after cautious thinking. However, such training experience ingenuously conforms to the artist’s tendency of exploring the experience of thinking, which forms the basis of her art-making today.

It is rather unconventional for an artist to insist on the genre of painting when contemporary art is represented with diversified media. The isolation felt by Huang Pin-Ling during her period in France not only resulted from differences of cultural background and language. When her classmates devoted to exploring the currently more mainstream media or trends of contemporary art, such as conceptual art, installation, performance and video, Huang continued to stay in the relatively unpopular field of painting in an attempt to dialogue with herself and the world through the pictorial language beyond any linguistic logic. Huang Pin-Ling revealed how she, due to the language barrier, could only burst into tears when her teacher in the National School of Fine Arts in Paris asked her the reason of insisting on painting as the medium.

The paintings of Huang Pin-Ling are connected to consciousness and emotion. And if one can describe the former, our dream would have been less complex. The very few words presented in the artist’s oeuvre might appear in the works’ titles: “unknown”, “wind”, “air” and “memory”. When words encounter objects beyond description, probably only landscape between illusion and reality can get to the edge of consciousness as close as possible. The artist has been driving between her studio and part-time workplace due to her job in recent years. Does the driving experience influence Huang Pin-Ling’ recent paintings? Rather, such experience makes the artist repeatedly associate to her own psychological state. The artist once tried to describe as follows, “It is like I’m confined in a shell and try to look at the scenery outside of it.” Just like watching trees and hills outside of a car window during rapid motion, the destined solitude makes us blend all real landscape in the fast-passing life into dream.


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