Hong Kong, Pedder Building 6/F, 27 March – 11 May, 2018, https://www.pearllam.com
The fixed layout of the gallery walls gave me a familiar feeing: The reception with the glass wall, the longer corridor behind the reception corner, and then the two less busy “contemplative” side rooms left and right, one of them ending at the other side of the glass wall, inside of a kind of “aquarium”.
Huang Yanqing’s painting reminded me a bit of Cy Twombly, because they also had this feeling of being “drawn” (with a paintbrush) rather than painted. But the strokes were still much more prominent, expressive yet calm than in the case of Twobly’s slightly nervous scribbles. The color-strokes-on-white-canvas approach as well as the color palette made me also think of Günter Förgs late work on display at at a different gallery in the same building some years ago.
The gallery walls were painted grey, so that the white background of the canvases could stand out against the wall, and it really worked well that way.
The style of painting was also quite “Pearl Lam style” – abstract larger paintings with prominent colors and a material presence.
The show did not have much of a “narrative” and the paintings looked all a bit similar to me, but that might be just because joining the opening night is not the best time to contemplate this kind of details…
