All posts tagged: Chris Huen

Chris Huen Sin Kan

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Elliat Albrecht / As a painter and in person, Chris Huen Sin Kan is far beyond his years. His intuitive paintings look less like those of a 27-year-old and more like those of an artist who’s had several decades to hone his visual language, arriving at a mature and idiosyncratic style of painting. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Huen has been drawing since he was a small child, and earned a BA from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Made with fluid and sometimes staccato brushstrokes, his paintings are characterised by their quotidian content and sketch-like quality; Huen achieves this aesthetic in part by thinning down his oils with turpentine until they appear almost like watercolours. The bare canvas shows through in many places on his paintings; the viewer is left to fill in the blanks of negative space like a word game. These gaps in perception are fundamental to Huen’s philosophy: rather than painting direct representations or his memories, he is concerned with exploring the fragmented experience of looking. With a …

Chris Huen Sin Kan

Published by Artomity Magazine

Of Humdrum Moments /Pilar Corrias /London /19 May – 17 Jun, 2017 /Alex Quicho / Hong Kong artist Chris Huen Sin Kan exhibited eight large paintings at London’s Pilar Corrias gallery, each dedicated to a fleeting everyday moment – moments that Huen believes are forgotten in the narrative of our everyday lives. These are drawings more than paintings: painted in oil, colours nonetheless appear as distinct, as if from a marker pen. As confidence underpins shakiness, something about Huen’s style seems purposely naive. Observing the convergence of so much movement to reveal unspoiled white ground raises questions about the mechanisms of his apparent spontaneity. Once undervalued, the snapshot finds itself prized today. From Wolfgang Tillmans to Juergen Teller, many artists have found the exalted in the in-between, fine-tuning our whittled attention spans to appreciate otherwise neglected details. In Huen’s work, the freeze-frame quality of mercurial surfaces – the water in a kiddie pool, the twist of dense foliage, a restless dog’s sudden gaze – hints at photographic reference material. The snap of a shutter seals an otherwise fleeting …