Benrei HUANG: Shapes of self-reflection

There is often “shadow” in my paintings, and I am often asked why it exists. “Is the shadow you? Your subconscious? Anti-consciousness? A reflection of the twists and turns in your mind? Or what?” I don’t have an answer. Maybe it’s all of the above, or maybe it’s none of the above. But what I can be certain is that although the shadow is not a physical object, it is as important as the character Nini in the composition, just like the relationship between positive space and negative space in painting. In a painterly sense, that is the relationship between shadow and Nini. They are framed together in a painting, depicting a situation in which you can see your own image. You discover your subconscious, anti-consciousness, or the twists and turns in your mind, or whatever. It’s all possible. The closest answer I can give is that, to me, the shadow is an independent entity, faint as it may be. Wherever the shadow appears, it is a relative possibility outside the normal Nini. And since it’s a “possibility”, it can be unreasonable and not be governed by reality. I like this kind of freedom. Yes, drawing shadows represents the freedom of consciousness.

I don’t remember when I started to paint the bunny and flying. These two things seem to be unrelated to each other, yet they have appeared many times in my paintings. Someone must have told me the best dream they have ever had is that they could fly! I desperately want to analyze this flying dream from a psychological perspective, because I have never had such a wonderful dream. There must be some hidden message hinting at being able to fly or not, or being able to dream about flying or never having that dream. But whenever I think of flying, the first hurdle that springs to mind is that I would have to learn how to fly! That is just too much trouble and hard work. Despite this, I have since been painting with “flying lesson” as the theme, as if by doing so, I can prepare myself for having the dream of flying. 

To this day, I still haven’t had any dream about me flying, but I am curiously looking forward to it.