Double Square 双方藝廊

Double Square Gallery is delighted to present Surpass – Huang Li-Ying, which will run from January 7 to February 25, 2023. Featuring more than ten paintings, this exhibition will be the artist’s first solo exhibition at Double Square Gallery after his participation in Younger Than Buddha, a group exhibition presented at the gallery in 2021. Huang utilizes the characteristics of graphite to explore how to expand the visual perception of space in works, as well as the relative relations among the spectator, the works, light, and the exhibition space. The exhibition title, Surpass, suggests facilitating interaction between the works and the spectator via visual connection in the two-dimensional space. The “surpassing” can take place in terms of the relation between the spectator and the artist, the medium and its vehicle, or the object and the material, which allows a new visual experience to emerge from seemingly conflicting yet interconnecting states in different relative relations.

In two-dimensional space, shadow is often used as a foil to the existence of light, and the delicate layers of shadow also reflect the layers of light. However, Huang reverses the creative logic of sketch drawing, and highlights the subject matter by “painting light” instead, utilizing the effect of reflection produced by graphite to delineate natural materials without any fixity. Following the changes of light and viewing angle in a site, the shadow sets off the layers of light by contrast, and reveals the delicate texture and brushstrokes. Short and rapid lines are interwoven in the works to produce the change of rhythm, weaving out the structure of the images while translating the vocabularies of natural sceneries. The Stone series featured in this exhibition revolves around a core creative concept – truthiness, which describes the quality of “being considered true because it feels so.” Combining Western media and the Eastern philosophy of expressing feelings through objects, Huang portrays the changing light and shadow of stones under the working of light to demonstrate the charm of conveying emotions through objects, an approach used by ancient literati. Stones, in this case, become an objective vehicle that leads the spectator to project his or her own experience into the works to roam in different spatial dimensions and perceive the mysteriousness of nature.