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whether it is representational or abstract, for example. Basically, the painting has to tell me what to do and not the other way around. I often refer to the following example that might be a reasonable analogy to my approach; I remember listening to a writer in conversation and the journalist asked why the protagonist died in the end. Te writer answered he did not design the protagonist’s death, he just had to die as that was his destiny. I resonate with this, because, in a way, I feel the paintings painted themselves and I am just a conduit. Te painting gives me directions and hints and tells me how to proceed and how to finish.


Some Days You Wrestle Some Days You Do the Storytelling (2023), oil on linen, 173 x 203 x 3,5 cm. All images courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Seoul. Photos: Charles Duprat


Academy of Fine Arts for three years. Te major difference in graduate school is that all the time is yours and you do not have to attend as many classes. I therefore seized the opportunity to go to the Netherlands on an exchange programme for a semester. I then went on to New York. It is a very exciting city. Looking back, I was such a blank page at that time and I was more than ready to open my arms and absorb everything. I did not even have a preconceived notion of what the city would be like. I did not base my expectations on Sex in the City, or any Woody Allen film. I was just extremely ignorant which was actually good. I was there briefly in 2010 before moving there officially in 2011. Te difficulty for me was to be there legitimately with a valid reason and a visa. Te only option available to me was to be in school again and this is what I ended up doing. After that, in 2014, I was an artist’s assistant for a year before starting to work as a full-time artist. I was extremely fortunate, because today not everybody can live from their art. I was struggling financially, but then I started exhibiting and was able to support myself like every young artist in New York. I left New York in 2018 only


because it was truly suffocating for me. My two rents (studio and home) had increased year after year and this was constantly on my mind and was incredibly stressful. I kept asking myself: where do I go from here? I moved to LA, and since I was working with Night Galerie starting 2016, at least I had some kind of support there. Moving to Los Angeles, I needed a space where I could be a little bit more relaxed when painting.


AAN: Today, when returning to China, what captures your attention? HB: In China, I am obsessed with temples, terracotta objects and the grottoes. As an artist, this is what truly gives me life and strength. Looking back, I was so ignorant. Today, every time I go back to China, I have to visit Shanxi and Gansu. Tese places give me as much inspiration and education as places in Europe. As I mentioned earlier, referring to the frescoes, Renaissance art, 15th-century German paintings, etc. In addition, there are certain artists that I revisit


over and over again and every time I see their art, it gives me a tremendous shock. For example, El Greco is one of my favourite figurative artists and when I was in New York, I had to go back to Te Met every once in a while to revisit his work. Beyond El Greco, Botticelli and German Renaissance painters are the artists I always go back to. Basically, I am drawn to the paintings themselves. It has nothing to do with their history, the functioning of the time of these paintings, and it is not related to religion. It is the actual paintings, like the Giotto frescoes I saw in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. I feel less influenced by contemporary art than by these older paintings.


AAN: Your work incorporates both very figurative and abstract elements. How would you describe your working process? HB: I work in an absolutely organic way and I do not adhere to any rules. To me, the most important is to be true to how I feel at that moment. I very much rely on ‘inspiration’, as I am waiting for things to come into my world and vision to inspire me. I see something that makes me feel a certain way and I do everything to seize that moment, being honest and true to it while being amazed by what I saw or experienced. I strive to be authentic, as much as possible, and transfer this onto the canvas. In addition, I do not set any limits.


AAN: What imagery, or thought, is at the centre of your painting when you start working on a piece? HB: Primarily, metro and subway adverts. In addition, I had the habit of collecting screenshots from YouTube videos, where people would transfer VHS tapes into a digital version and put it on the internet. Tese tapes covering private moments probably from a family’s collection were found in a thrift store, and since they can go back 50 years, there might be scratches and imperfections. Tere would be glitches on the tape, creating this interesting texture of the video and this, in my opinion, is also abstraction. For example, when watching TV or a degraded, low-quality video that is transcribed from either film or VHS or DVD, it would have this kind of wash of marks or noise and interruptions. I always find it interesting when this happens, because it is the moment when abstraction happens. As to the subway adverts, they are


being pasted on a wall, but they are constantly replaced. Tere might be people scrawling graffiti on it, thus changing the whole image and then it would be removed, but they would only peel it off halfway. As a result, there is this juxtaposition of different realities or even different worlds. For


Not Hostile Not Reluctant Not Deaf (2023), oil and acrylic on linen, 172.7 x 263.2 x 2.5 cm


example, there could be a photo- realistic imagery with this mundane content of an insurance ad, with a person wearing a suit and tie, smiling. Ten, on top of it might be this cartoonish or 2D-E (a form of electrophoresis used to analyse proteins) with vibrant colours. It never ceases to amaze me how these two realities are layered together and how they are presented all at once. However, they are from different worlds and even from different dimensions. Every time I see them, I am wondering whether everybody else is seeing what I am seeing, because sometimes it can be truly striking. I always think of these adverts as clouds coming together, forming a certain shape and then drifting apart. It’s never repetitive. It is always a kind of mysterious energy or complete strangers putting all these things together, and I am the person who borrowed it as the blueprint of my painting. In a way, I feel I did not make the painting, but someone else did.


I very much rely on inspiration, waiting for


things to come into my world


AAN: It almost seems like a collaboration with the anonymous? HB: Yes, absolutely. Sometimes, I would see images that are collaged together where somebody else has already done 90% of the work for me and all I have to do is to make them into a painting. Sometimes, I see a composition that has potential and use it, although this is only the starting point. Te final product is far away from what I used, and usually people would not be able to trace or recognise the reference I was using. Basically, it would be a different journey for the image that I had initially discovered.


AAN: Completing a painting is quite a solitary undertaking, do you think about your audience? How do you feel about the process? HB: I do not really think of the audience when I am painting. Te first and only audience would be myself and I am the only one responsible for how I feel about the painting. While I was studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, the school had a very specific oil-painting tradition and, in my case, certain aspects have stayed with me until this day. For example, all too often, I cannot relax, as I have to make a painting that has to be complete, finished, and thorough. Over the years, I learned to be a little looser and raw at certain moments, but a lot of times it has to be complete otherwise it would bother me. Tat is an important aspect I think about from the beginning to the end of working on the painting. Also, another thing I learnt from a professor at art


Paul’s Dream (2023), oil on linen, 143 x 177.8 cm


school, which has proved to be quite useful, is at any stage of the painting, it has to be a finished


painting and there is no such thing as the piece being a rough sketch or a stage one, two, three or four painting. For example, the first exhibition Te Met, held in the Breuer building was Unfinished: Toughts Left Visible. Although the show was addressing the issues of unfinished paintings, to me, they all looked incredibly charming, and I did not see them as unfinished, I saw them as a complete piece of art, ready to be challenged. Tey did not seem raw to me, on the contrary, they seemed very set and complete.


AAN: That, of course, leads me to the question when do you consider a painting to be finished? HB: Tis is a great question, because I always struggle to find the answer. However, the other day, I actually found an answer, which is when you feel that you have to accept it. Te way I proceed is to work on the painting for a period of time and then, if I get stuck, I put it aside and will go back to it and revisit it. It would then appear differently and I would be able to decide whether I was going to keep working on it, or whether it was finished. You have to be honest, and ask yourself if you want to keep working, because you want to present the painting in a certain way, or because you want it to be presentable in a way that it looks like a solid finished painting? Are you allowing yourself to be vulnerable, having an exhibition with certain imperfections in the painting? Ten, you perfect it, keeping in mind that by making it perfect, it might lose certain characteristic of the original. Usually, I would make a decision between these two decisions and then, at a certain point, I have to convince myself that I have to stop painting somehow. It is about making a decision and accepting it, because in the end, I do not want to make the ‘perfect’ painting. At the initial stages, the painting is based on a very spontaneous composition, which I always refer to as the skeleton of the painting. I do not want to go too far away from that thought, although sometimes I am not so faithful to the first composition that I had decided upon, as it would evolve to a an entirely different creature, which is also all right. Even if this sounds pretentious, ultimately, the painting will tell me. But coming back to your initial question, if you ask most painters, they would always tell you that if they got their painting back they could still work on it.


AAN: That raises a more philosophical question: What is a perfect painting? HB: Tis is exactly why I believe it is important to put the painting aside. As they say in philosophy, ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’.


Continued on page 4 ASIAN ART | WINTER 2023


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