Chris Huen Sin-kan, MuiMui, 2024, Watercolour and coloured pencils on paper, 77 x 57 cm (30 1/4 x 22 1/2 in)

Chris Huen Sin-kan, MuiMui, 2024, Watercolour and coloured pencils on paper, 77 x 57 cm (30 1/4 x 22 1/2 in)

I like to prowl ordinary places
and taste the people ---
from a distance.
— Charles Bukowski, from “59 Cents a Pound” in Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit (1979)

I: THE POETRY OF PROSE

For an artist whose practice has consistently engaged with the prose of his everyday life, a gentle – yet no less cogent - poesy perfumes the air of Chris Huen Sin-kan’s achingly beautiful paintings. His is a melody of paint that weeps in the gardens to which he and his family make regular visits together and trembles – sometimes in disquiet, other times in adventure – in the woods where he walks his two dogs. Huen’s insistence on unveiling what he calls ‘the ordinariness of my unsubstantial experiences’ thus sits at odds with the fugue-like polyphony of his compositions, nourished by a delicate, tremulous mark making that seems to hover over his subject, eliciting a metamorphosis of form and nuance that sees the ordinary effloresce into the remarkable.

This wedding of an unadorned description of one’s usual life with a painterly vernacular ordinarily associated with dreamy descriptions of wish and wonder is the hallmark of Huen’s art. By concentrating on protagonists and routines with whom he is most familiar, the artist empowers himself to both divulge and indulge in a painterly craft that offers more than the mere registration such regularity or ordinariness requires. Huen is blessed with a faculty that enables his brush to accentuate and comfort his subject, even as it inveigles the mood and atmosphere that occupies them, but without ever shifting their material status as real people in a real world or our basic experience and understanding of that status. Huen wants his viewer to knowingly drift between earthly, grounded prose and empyreal, magical poetry, as if lifted by a gentle hallucination, yet remain anchored to the reality of his figure and focus.

So it is this essay will accompany Chris Huen Sin-kan as we take a walk – the very same walk he made every day during the pandemic in the woods near his home just outside of Wimbledon – with his two dogs MuiMui and Balltsz. It’s a walk that transcends time and tense, experienced now having been undertaken before and yet which speaks to an illusion that only the future can (ful)fill. Back and forth we shall go between then and now, how and why, where and when and then again and, at all times, one will never quite be sure whether we’re prowling the cool prose of the Sign or the softer poetry of its signification.

II: THE ENIGMA OF THE ORDINARY

Charles Bukowski, like many poets, didn’t care much for ordinariness. Banality, the humdrum, the typical: all these notions supposedly serving to anaesthetize creativity or one’s desire for play and surprise (to paraphrase C. S. Lewis). However, Huen’s commitment to chronicling his personal life – no more, no less – is the very same act of ‘tasting’ life that Bukowski seeks to experience. Born in Hong Kong, many of Huen’s young creative peers found their artistic inspiration in the Chinese city-state’s local social affairs. For Huen, such explorations offered little resonance to him as a painter and made him feel that he was stretching his practice technically and conceptually just to accommodate the subject. This led to a pause and an introspection and from that bloomed the confidence to use himself and his everyday life as the exclusive source for his work. Nothing challenges potential matrices of coercion more than mantras of being that confirm one’s unsullied resolution and presence and which make it impossible for their viewer to do otherwise. After all, existence is the ultimate means of resistance.

Chris Huen Sin-kan, Balltsz, 2024, Oil on canvas, 25.3 x 30.2 cm (10 x 11 7/8 in)

Chris Huen Sin-kan, MuiMui, 2024, Oil on canvas, 25.3 x 30.2 cm (10 x 11 7/8 in)

Chris Huen Sin-kan, Balltsz, 2024, Oil on canvas, 25.3 x 30.2 cm (10 x 11 7/8 in)

Chris Huen Sin-kan, Balltsz, 2024, Oil on canvas, 25.3 x 30.2 cm (10 x 11 7/8 in)

Chris Huen Sin-kan, MuiMui, 2024, Oil on canvas, 25.3 x 30.2 cm (10 x 11 7/8 in)

Chris Huen Sin-kan, Balltsz, 2024, Oil on canvas, 25.3 x 30.2 cm (10 x 11 7/8 in)

Huen’s relatively recent move to London from Hong Kong in March 2021 saw his work become ever more pledged to displaying his own life. An ambiguity of sorts was subsequently diffused throughout his painting, turning that which was known into uncertain, if not exactly unknown. A new city always comes with fewer friends and less family around which meant that Huen’s subject – his life and his immediate circle – became increasingly important to him. That ambiguity and its concomitant enigma hums across all the paintings in this exhibition. If one looks at the smaller works of, especially, Balltsz, we find his beloved dog sized down, frolicking in a sunny copse interrupted by arboreal shadows that command the moment but don’t constrain it and which are further enlivened by mottled daubs of green, blue, and orange that whisper the morning light glowing through dense foliage. The diminutive dog, whilst not overwhelmed by its environment, also does not ostensibly appear to chime with it completely. It is this slight dissonance between prosaic subject and poetic ground that ultimately feeds such ambiguity and mystery, nurturing a sense of delicate displacement that is as heartrending as it is beautiful.

III: THE SHIP OF THESEUS

Being is both past and present. A mosaic of memories as much as a tessellation of synaptic flashes, all of which commingle together to engender the fluidity of experience. In always turning to his own life, Huen’s work thus unavoidably addresses the dynamics of identity and, in so doing, we are once again flung between different times and dimensions as we absorb his work.

Chris Huen Sin-kan, Joel, 2024, Oil on canvas, 200 x 240 cm (78 3/4 x 94 1/2 in)

Chris Huen Sin-kan, Joel, 2024, Oil on canvas, 200 x 240 cm (78 3/4 x 94 1/2 in)

The large painting of his son, Joel, suspended in an amphitheatre of delectable abbreviation, elegantly reveals Huen’s determination to evince a time and space that is both past and present. A bounteous garden breathes in purple exhalations of buddleia and sage tears of leaves. These recognisable forms soon drift into coils, cogs and clouds of line and colour, just as memory, soon enough, meanders from certainty to ambivalence to forgotten. Huen’s ground is at its most abstract and agitated here, yet his figure remains calm and composed within it; like a final part of the mosaic yet to be distressed by the waves of time.

Each mark, each byte of painterly data that Huen allows to escape (but then replace) is akin to the thought experiment known as ‘The Ship of Theseus’ which questions whether an object can be regarded as the same object if all its original components are (eventually) replaced. The Athenian King Theseus killed the Minotaur and escaped to the island of Delos on a ship. Countless Athenians subsequently made pilgrimages to Delos to honour him on that same ship. Philosophers questioned whether, after centuries of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, would it – could it – still be the same ship? Identity (at least our personal understanding of our own identity) can suffer a similar doubt or impugn of past and thus presence. Just as Huen’s young son remains steadfast as the composition’s anchor, all around him – the place, time, space, memory, and moment – begins to evaporate into ornamental clouds of becoming and finale.

IV: HAIKU

Huen paints like the haiku reads in that both artist and poem serve up mirages. What one sees in a painting by Huen is not what one is seeing and this push-pull between the ‘named’ subject and the condensation of its frame is the very essence of the haiku. A poetic form that – like Huen’s alchemical touch - lets words float, swaying effortlessly, without being weighed down by their own syntactic or semantic armour, between labyrinths of various meaning.

Chris Huen Sin-kan, MuiMui, 2024, Oil on canvas, 160 x 180 cm (63 x 70 7/8 in)

Chris Huen Sin-kan, MuiMui, 2024, Oil on canvas, 160 x 180 cm (63 x 70 7/8 in)

Huen’s inexplicably mystical touch – humane yet pregnant with such possibility – can be found in his large canvas depicting MuiMui. The palette is considerably darker here, yet the mood remains curious not ominous. The dog occupies the centre of the composition with its coat and body projected out of the pictorial space by an obsidian ground that, itself, is bedazzled with an intricate maze of branches and leaves that sparkle like stars in the night sky. It is a combination of Huen’s abbreviation then entanglement of form which becomes the platform upon which he encourages abstraction not to subsume but certainly interrogate the figure. Waves of ‘there’ and ‘where’ are recorded in constellations of colour that thrive both in juxtaposition and contradistinction, much as his searching, often fractured line seeks some semblance of concreteness yet rarely does. The result is a painted surface that shimmers with dubiety whilst remaining faithful to prevalence of the subject it evokes. Each mark of Huen’s acting like a single word in a haiku. It is just their propensity for interpretation, their weight and sequencing – all so difficult to get right in such a compendiary fashion – that elevates them, and the art works they serve.

Chris Huen Sin-kan, Balltsz, 2024, Oil on canvas, 70 x 85 cm (27 1/2 x 33 1/2 in)

Chris Huen Sin-kan, Balltsz, 2024, Oil on canvas, 70 x 85 cm (27 1/2 x 33 1/2 in)

V: FLOATING LIKE A LEAF ON A STREAM

Time, mark, mood, and the imbroglio of life itself all coalesce to propagate an oscillation in Huen’s painting that discloses moments of discombobulation yet, ironically, offer passages of placidity, stillness, and gentleness. Neil Young in his 2012 song, Walk Like a Giant, said that rather than feel like a powerful giant, “Now I feel like a leaf floating on a stream”. If we stay with that image for a second, it’s one that speaks of both a peacefulness yet also fragility. Indeed, there is a specific mindfulness exercise called ‘Leaves on the Stream’ which helps individuals to develop a more accepting relationship with their emotions, and especially those that make them feel more exposed and frangible. Feelings that seem to flow through Huen’s beloved pets as they appear to shimmy and shimmer into their painted fields.

That image of a floating leaf – a haiku all its own – ebbs through all of the paintings in this exhibition. Whilst not drifting on water, Huen’s leaves breezily cascade across wooded groves; they carpet forest floors; they disguise and even protect his dogs as they play in these orphic spaces saved and savoured both geographically and mythologically. Perhaps the invisible waters upon which these timorous leaves float are the tides of time and the tributaries of signification that stream from them. Huen’s subjects – much like a floating leaf adrift on a stream – are never fixed. Their palpitation – spatial and temporal; invented and remembered – thus brings us back to Huen’s own perception of the ordinariness of life. For the artist, life (and his ambition to capture all its vicissitudes) is shaped by one’s reluctance or desire to push forwards or retreat to a bygone time or place. Progression in life thus mirrors the evolution of a painting. Neither can be developed or experienced in a linear fashion. Much as marks can be made, erased, and remade, so too can one move onwards whilst occasionally retracing one’s steps. Therein lies both the gentleness and power; dynamo and tranquility of Chris Huen Sin-kan’s poignant, precious paintings. Works that move both forwards and backwards between then and when, home and away, as they seek some understanding of – and solace in – the here and now.