Ran Huang

February 27, 2015

Hugo Hess

Music, Gestalt, .

Ran Huang is a progressive young artist with a body of work encompassing film, video, sculpture, installation, photography, painting and drawing. Critically interested in perception, Huang often incorporates juxtaposition and paradox into his works in ways that are both visually and conceptually driven. Interested in breaking apart systems of representation and rearranging the resulting elements in new, unsettling ways, Huang describes his practice as an attempt to ‘examine the point where we are voluntarily gelded by a secured experience of aesthetical insecurity’.

Huang was born in 1982 in Xichang. Between 2005 and 2007 he obtained an MFA in Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, University of London. He names as an influence Georges Bataille, who in the 1920s argued that art should do away with symbolic codes and confront viewers with “the thing itself” rather than interpretations of it. (In Huang Ran’s view, Bataille was a revolutionary trying “to subvert the system”.)

Huang is perhaps best known for his films, such as Disruptive Desires, Tranquility and the Loss of Lucidity (2012), Blithe Tragedy (2010), and Fake Action Truth (2009), which have received international attention and critical acclaim. Creating a swirl of conflicting emotions, his films often exhibit tensions between surface and story, where beautiful, “perfect” images serve as a façade for the shattered inner world of the characters depicted.

Huang considers film to be both a compelling medium and a ‘very powerful container’. He has said on the subject: ‘you know that everything is designed, everything is faked, but you still believe it. Everything is about image and everything can be superficial, but at the same time, it is very complex and potent’. As with his works in other media, Huang hopes his films will induce viewers into a state of acceptance, in which they will bypass the tendency to reason and comprehend in favor of belief.

Currently lives and works in Beijing and London.