Hoffmann + Maler + Wallenberg is pleased to announce Atlas, a solo exhibition by the Chinese American artist Yanyan Huang (b. 1988, Sichuan, China). This is the gallery’s first exhibition with Huang. The show features a series of twenty paintings on paper and six ink and acrylic paintings on canvas, all made in 2022. Atlas is the result of the artist’s three-month stay in Aix-en-Provence, France.

Huang’s work dances between ink and acrylic paint, between thick and delicate strokes and swirls, between peaceful gestures and expressive moments of bright color soaring around the canvas. The artist lets her abstractions act as signifiers of her own subjectivity, which she braids together with contemporary influences as diverse as ceramics, fashion, and advertising. In its intertwining of the generic and the specific, the universal and the unique, the handmade and the disposable, Huang’s project becomes, in its uniquely abstract way, a portrait of selfhood today.

The works presented in Atlas are mercurial—in both temperament and palette—suggesting a disorienting immersion in the natural world rather than a serene collection of plein air studies. Neutral earth tones curl freely around brighter elements, in either a harmonious interplay or a frenzied attempt at dominance. The weightlessness of Huang’s marks makes them resemble both smoke and the lower depths of the sea—environments that obscure, conceal, and bewitch. Contrasting navy blues and umbers grasp at fuchsias and lemon yellows, dazzling our eyes, while precise, dark lines wrap around the backs of our minds, reluctant to let go.

Huang was born in China and grew up in the United States, and today operates in a long tradition of Western painters being influenced by Chinese ink painting and Eastern motifs more generally. She holds a BA from UCLA (2012). She also studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the American University of Rome, where she immersed herself in Renaissance art and classical and Baroque music. The artist speaks of her practice as dancing with time—both the time it takes to make the work, and the long historical gap between the earliest Chinese calligraphy, made around three thousand years ago during the Shang dynasty, and US Abstract Expressionism, which emerged in the 1950s, both of which are abundantly evident as influences.

Huang’s recent solo shows include Time Feast, Latitude Gallery, New York (2022); Silenzio del Tempo, Dellupi Arte, Milan (2022); 黃彥彥, Bank Gallery, Shanghai (2018); Cloud Tempo, SALT Projects, Beijing (2018); and Nebbia del Tempo, Ibid Gallery, Los Angeles (2018), among many others.

Atlas will be accompanied by a publication from by HMW Books, presenting all the works in the show and an interview with Huang by Jens Hoffmann.