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Text / Pinling Huang
Painting to me, as a way to have a contact with the environment and the world around me. And it is also a way that I have the conversations with my self. Although, there are still some misunderstandings, sometimes. But through painting, it will be very lucky to have some moments that suddenly understand something or have the communication whit the others, this would be satisfy enough to me.

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【How to describe wind that smells like herbs? About Pinling Huang’s exhibition after her residency in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France 】

Text / KuanYu Chen

Pinling Huang’s recent series made during her artist residency in France is the result of a period of life of hiking and sketching. The title of the exhibition “Paysages en mouvance / Pensées figées" (Moving landscapes / Frozen thoughts) can be considered as her unique insight into the experience. The residency at Cour des Arts was located in the mountain area of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Van Gogh spent much of his later years sketching. Imagine her on a mountain trail, feeling the flow of light and air at different moments, welcoming the ever-changing trees and sky, watching the movement and stillness of various bodies of water and rocks, breathing in the scent of mountains and land, and meditating on her own integration into them.

Pinling Huang’s paintings are like extractions of perceptual modalities, dealing with existential issues between “gazing at feelings” and “sorting out feelings”. Of course, it could be argued that this was simply a way of documenting the environment and the landscape, but the classic connection between the process of sketching and the practice of painting should not be ignored, especially the rich history and connotations regarding body and movement. These painterly states of landscape are usually surrounded by sensation, memory, reverberation and after-effects, and such experiences are intimate and difficult to be shared.
The Japanese writer Natsume Soseki once described his experience of contemplating on how to transform the scenery he saw and his feelings into a painting during a trip in the mountains. Through mixing with different types of writings, such as fiction and sketchbooks filled with haiku, he pursued the ideal picture in his mind. "I often thought that the relationship between air, objects and colour is one of the most fascinating studies in the universe. Is it colour that creates air, or is it objects that construct air? Or is it air that generates colours and objects? Painting can create different tones with a single thought within a moment.” This is how Natsume Soseki described his thoughts on sketching in the book “Kusamakura” (Grass Pillow), which can provide some interesting insights into Pinling Huang’s paintings.

If we examine the relationship between painting and sketching deeply, we would notice that sketching activates whole body of senses and the remnants of thought through the processes of translation, description, expression, recollection and reverberation in the dynamic indications that continuously flow in and out of the images in every moment. Sketching is to frame the view swiftly in a scenario. It is not to describe what is laid in front of you, but to organize certain sensations that come from the objects and originate from the self. It is an epiphanic ecstasy towards a fragmented scene or a chance encounter on a journey, and the eagerness to capture it.

The quick sketches on sketchbooks, or “Dessin à Côté du Lac de Peiroou” made with oil paints and oil pastel on canvas, along with many other of her oil paintings, can be considered as an effective language Pinling Huang applied to converse with the environment and herself. They collectively created a visual style of fluidity and looseness. Specifically, you might find stacks of non-spatial related elements and spatial arrangements without depth of perspectives in “Rocks with Linen Blue Shadow”, “La Chaleur du Soleil”, “Sur le Chemin des Baux” and “Sur le Chemin du Retour des Baux”. However, the multiple depths created by the extremely delicate blending of paints which formed different layers of colours, the spatial narrative where the main focus recedes but presented with the overall presence of space, and other organisational techniques that allow the integration of spaces, have all enabled Pinling Huang’s landscape paintings, as expressions of feelings, to be extended as a perspective that connects the environment and life. This is also reflected in “Lumière Douce”, “Souffle d’Automne”, “Paysage avec Arbres”, “Dans les Bois” and “Un Morceau de Paysage”.

On the other hand, the larger four-painting series “Scenery Going By” and “Le Vent de l’Odeur des Herbes” have a more suggestive and expressive way of showing the wind's movement. Through the texture of paints, the layout of colours and the dynamic brushwork, they lay out a rhythm of different strengths, referred to the smell and time of the moment. If the art historian Hubert Damisch saw brushstroke as where the subjectivity laid in paintings, not just as a manifestation of the painters’ personality or style, nor a meaning projected on the traces of paintings, it is as if the painting has a life and narrative of its own that is radiating outwards from the surface of the canvas, in that case, to a certain extent, Pinling Huang also established her own perspective towards brushwork through the “event of painting” - sketching in the mountains around the French town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. It is perhaps a subjective state of constant intermingling and mediation, which somewhat mirrors Natsume Soseki's description of the possibility of the continuous search and extraction between the world and the creative consciousness.