Chunqing Huang’s painting “William Turner” is part of her Painter’s Portrait series. In the case of this impressive series, the ‘portrait’ is not a picture of the artist as a person, rather an image that captures an entire body of work. Working on small canvases, Chunqing Huang paints impressions that come to her after viewing pictures by a particular painter. If these painterly responses had an ironic edge to them, they would be called pastiches. But that is far from the case here, for what we see is the serious appropriation of European Modernism (from Édouard Manet to Maria Lassnig) by a painter who was born in China, went to art school in Beijing, before moving to Frankfurt in 2000 to attend the Städelschule, where she later graduated as a master student in the class of Hermann Nitsch. Art historians speak of the appropriation of a style. In Chunqing Huang’s case it is a precise and unabashed appropriation — of the painterly style, the brushwork, the handling of colour, the light: in other words, a painter’s style. She paraphrases the style, but does not adopt it in her own work. Even the subjects of the works shine through indirectly. This concept is quite confusing. One must measure it by the result. What arises is an internalized museum of European art, the distilled essence of many gallery visits. The approach is serious while the execution remains playful. That Huang is not satisfied with producing studies of one epoch after another is evident in her thorough exploration of the Expressionists, as she traces their highly individual painterly mannerisms and joy at picture-making. The ‘art of description’ is no trifling matter, even in the case of the written word. Here ‘description’ is taken to its logical conclusion as a new work: an overpainting. Text by Ulf Erdmann Ziegler.
