 Welcome
to this website and thank you for dropping in.
This website was put together because of the many requests received
for more information on my granddad, Huang Yao (1917-1987) and his
works, as well as to seek professional help in the understanding of
what he had done.
My granddad loved all aspects of the Chinese culture that were beautiful
and splendid. However, it was in earlier 1999 that we, my family and
I realized how wide ranging and deep his love was. It was then that
a very large collection of his paintings and cartoons together with
his research notes, sketches and writings on art and cultural history
was found. It was a great surprise as a large part of these work was
unknown to us. It took us almost a year to extract, cleaned and catalogued
them. Later with the expertise of the Singapore Art Museum, the paintings
were sorted, stored and an exhibition for a sample of them was held
in July 2001.
We are still exploring what to do with this collection. Luckily it
is relatively intact. Some of his artwork, especially the Wenzi Hua,
the paintings of the Chinese words, we were told, are likely to be
more comprehensive and far advanced than the current Calligraphic
Painting. It is sincerely hoped that they are worthy of research and
scholarship. Experts in Chinese calligraphy and paintings who are
interested in this type of artwork are most welcome to further analyse
this set of work.
We have laid out the website into a few main areas, the "Introduction"
where you will find his biography, with pictures of him and his friends
in China; a list (incomplete) of exhibitions that we have records
of and the travel route he took through interior China and then South
East Asia. These provide a glimpse into a very different, hopefully
interesting world.
The next section is "Wenzi Hua", These works are the result of my
granddad's deep interest in ancient Chinese scripts, and more than
ten years of research. The bulk of these paintings were executed in
the 1970's. If you can resist looking at the titles and have some
recognitions of ancient Chinese scripts, you may be able to figure
out the poems or Chinese idioms in the paintings. His later stages
evolved into very abstract forms, those without titles are to me like
puzzles. In my granddad's lifetime, not many people appreciated or
understood Wenzi Hua and as a result, he kept most of them for his
own enjoyment . In the 1980's he fell ill and he wrote a great deal
then to leave behind his views on Chinese art and explanations of
what he was doing. We had classified his Wenzi Hua by reading these
writings and figuring out what he had created.
Under "Other Paintings", we have grouped together all the paintings
besides those of Wenzi Hua. In this category, we have put his innovative
'upside down' calligraphy, classical paintings, cultural paintings
of scenes in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia and the cartoons which
he was famous for as early as he was a teenager in China. We also
put Ziyou Hua (spontaneous paintings) in this category, as it is different
from Wenzi Hua. We have learnt that he was studying lifestyles of
primitive man and their "companions", the animals. It was likely that
with this as inspiration, he used the Chinese traditional painting
techniques and Chinese brush to create this very abstract set of artwork.
We have not gotten very far in our understanding of Ziyou Hua and
are looking for experts and insights on where this set may belong.
We tried to pull together all his writings under "Publication". In
time, we will try and get these works translated to facilitate research
of his works.
I hope you will enjoy the site, we welcome feedback and ideas and
suggestions on not just what to do with this collection but also for
further improvement of this website. |
