Fridae

Hui Xin’s new works see him taking traditional Chinese motifs, and transforming them into kitschy, gaudy, artificially beautiful paintings.

His work is deliberately instantly comforting to the eye. It’s prettiness is in-your-face and superficial. It is almost as if he is poking fun at his generation who are so easily attracted to the bright lights of the big cities, and to loud, colourful window displays.

Making use of an airbrush gun to spray the paint evenly over the canvas, he then uses his brush to finely etch out the details. His painting technique adds to the highly stylized, artificiality of his paintings that might remind us of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. His work is hyper-realistic, yet we know it is not real at all. Perhaps he is reminding us of how much traditional Chinese culture and heritage has been watered down and diluted in the last fifty years that these symbols and motifs have become merely pretty yet vulgar images.