Huang Binhong

Biography

Huang Binhong later called his early manner “white”: a dry, light line, attentive to the empty space on the sheet. He painted this way until about the age of sixty. After that came the “black” period.

He was born on 27 January 1865 in Jinhua, in Zhejiang province, under the Qing dynasty. The family’s ancestral home was She County in Anhui, where his forebears came from; his grandfather is said to have been the painter Huang Fengliu. His father was a merchant and art lover, and it was he who gave his son an interest in painting. In 1888 the father’s business collapsed and the family moved to She County. There Huang Binhong became strongly attached to the local Xin’an painting and literature, whose methods he went on borrowing all his life. As a child he studied carving and painting, beginning by copying classical landscape painters, and later he collected old seals and studied inscriptions on bronze and stone.

His early manner took shape under the influence of Li Liufang, Cheng Sui, Cheng Zhengkui, Kun Can, Hong Ren and the masters of the Yuan and Ming dynasties. He took care that dark and light, positive and negative space, balanced one another.

Sympathetic to the revolution, he was, by some accounts, among those exposed as opponents of the Manchu dynasty, and he fled to Shanghai. From 1907 to 1937 he lived there. For the first twenty years he worked in newspapers and book publishing as a journalist and editor, then received a professorship at an art school in Shanghai. From the 1920s he worked with his friend Deng Shi on the series Meishu congshu (“Collection of Books on Fine Arts”) and ran Deng’s publishing house, Fengyulou. He himself wrote Huafa yaozhi (1934), in which he analysed five ways of working with the brush and seven ways of working with ink. His other writings include Gu hua wei (“On Ancient Painting”), an outline of the history of Chinese painting, and Hong lu hua tan (“Talks on Painting at Honglu”). Among his Shanghai students, the future well-known painter Lin Sanzhi is named.

After sixty he visited Guichi, and the scenery there changed his handling: he moved from the line of the brush to ink and wash. He took Wu Zhen as his model. In 1928 he travelled to Guangxi and Guangdong and painted from nature. Then, at sixty-nine to seventy, he went to Sichuan, where he was struck by Mount Qingcheng in the rain and Qutang Gorge by moonlight. Dripping, staining and layer upon layer of dense ink conveyed the damp mist of rain and mountains at night. Since then his manner has been described in four words: black, dense, thick, heavy. To my mind, this is the most exact short formula one can give for his mature work.

In 1937 he moved to Beijing and for eleven years taught at an art college. Most of his “black” landscapes were painted there. During the Sino-Japanese War, by some accounts, he was a professor in evacuation in Chongqing; it is hard to be more precise. In 1945 he held a solo exhibition.

In 1948 he returned to Zhejiang, to Hangzhou, and became a professor at the National Academy of Art. In Hangzhou his painting changed once more: inspired by Western Impressionism, he joined the two main currents of Chinese painting, ink and colour. Dots of red, green and blue pigment lay over layers of dense ink. In his last years he was deputy chairman of the East China branch of the Chinese Artists’ Association.

Huang Binhong died on 25 March 1955 in Hangzhou and is buried there, in Nanshan cemetery. In Hangzhou, on the slope of Qixia, there is a memorial to him; in Jinhua there is an art museum and a park named after him; and in 1999 the Huang Binhong Art Museum opened in Hangzhou.