According to many people in the arts world, Hua Qing’s name is united with the form of the anthropoid monkeys that he creates. For the sake of convenience, people call him ‘the monkey-man painter’ or the ‘ape painter’. In any case the forms that he paints have a relatively distinct shape in people’s eyes because the object that he chooses and creates is related to our human species in a way that other species are not.
So why does Hua Qing create with this theme? Is he actually painting humans or anthropoids? In the contemporary era, does work with the characteristics of an animal form have meaning and value? To analyze these problems will necessitate that we carefully consider the background of creation and conceptual history of the artist. Like many of the Chinese artists born in the 1960s, when Hua Qing studied at the Central Academy of Arts and Design. he met straight on with the fine arts activities that unfolded in ’85. The new wave of Chinese art in this era was the important uniting point for the arts and literature trends of the entire society, playing the role of conceptual liberator and initiator of cultural introspection in the visual world. Now art was not only to realistically depict the world of things that the naked eye saw, but must establish a relationship with the spirit of the self and the concealed spirit of society. He passionately studied the books of the academy and the books and painting catalogues outside of the academy, hoping to make his own work in agreement with the tenor of that era. When he continued to establish his practice outside of the academy, his early works therefore had an obvious expressionist air. At the same time his work began to participate in various avant-garde art activities, and he was the first individual worker among the group garrisoned at the artist village in the old Summer Palace. He quickly went to Europe and was based in the former Yugoslavia for the entirety of the ‘90s. He traveled and viewed Europe’s art museums and galleries, analyzed and distinguished between the positions and concepts of the various forms of western art and considered his own artistic direction. Later, he stayed six years in Taiwan, again separated from the mainland by an ocean. There he made a correspondingly deep understanding of the relationship of Asian art to the origins of western modern and contemporary art, and to his own developmental model as well.

 His experiences in the ‘90s traveling and living abroad caused Hua Qing to develop his own clear understanding and recognition of art: art of course was not an external propaganda tool of the government, but it was also not the simple re-creation of the real world, which is to say, it is not a realist reflection in the mirror in the vulgar sociological sense. Therefore, in vision and language, it should serve the artist’s own subjective active value judgment and choice, and should possess an individual form of vision. First, it should not exist and appear for the popularized or stylized, but should exist for the artist’s own ideas. It could not be part of the so-called popularized or stylized tide, but for certain it had to be in accord with the pluralistic trends of contemporary culture. Furthermore it must reveal and realize the deep-layer issues of contemporary social culture.
While abroad he accepted, fostered and established the independently determined individual consciousness of an artist. Hua Qing returned two years ago to his own motherland, and what he found was an even more politically open society, with an environment that was declining in political nature and increasing in commerciality and materialism. This environment was to a great extent more and more similar or close to the foreign countries and places that he has already lived and lingered in. This was already not that idealistic and passionately humanistic China of the ‘80s. This was a China with an economy increasing at high speeds, with a greater increase in material goods, with needs that were swelling excessively. It was a China liberated from the idea known as the greatest common denominator and with a cultural introspection that had been superseded by the uproar of the appeal of materialism. The value of human consciousness rarely gained real consideration. Artists living in China can all strongly sense the cultural difficulty that the great changes in economy and politics in Chinese society brought. What Hua Qing, having returned from abroad with an intermission of time and space, could strongly sense, we can only imagine. The greatest difficulty that he was faced with while abroad was how to protect the orientation of his own cultural values. After he returned the greatest difficulty was that there was clearly no way to directly acquire the orientation of cultural values from China that had its eyes filled with the appeal of materialism. But the orientation of these cultural values severely binds freedom of thought and the production of consciousness in people because the orientation of cultural values is then based only on the appeal of materialism. The emancipated thought of the early ‘80s and the efforts at cultural introspection, as well as its limited achievements, were thoroughly dispelled.
Hua Qing is not willing to be similar to the majority of Chinese artists, who use artistic devices to reflect on the prevailing winds of commercialism. In the style often used in those reflections the artists often adopt a form, a style, and a language that criticizes drawing on, and copies mass culture, as well as satirizing it. He has written: "artists cannot indulge only in the flashy, exaggerated and surface refuse. They cannot only stress the bits and parts assimilated from daily life, but should again concern themselves with vast and deep philosophical thought…" Here "again" refers to the close relationship between cultural fever and philosophical thinking in the ‘80s. It is visible that deep in Hua Qing’s heart he desires that art communicates a surpassing of the characteristics of the immediate materialist surface culture and enriches the connotations of spiritual content: "When artists objectively express the

superficiality of this commercial culture, or when they do so having found their own artistic form, it can come near to the deep layer of long-term human progress."
At first sight, Hua Qing’s understanding and judgment is seemingly evade the wildfire of the economic society and materialism in front of him, and are a failure to acclimate to this new climate and a remark of failure. What this understanding achieves is to establish his challenge to the development of Chinese contemporary art and all that western contemporary art is faced with, the foundation of two synthesized and contrasting evaluations. Specifically, Chinese contemporary art of today is more of a tool for the management of a commercialized plot, lacking in the establishment and guarding of a conscious rationality of the people behind this commercial society; contemporary western art, because of its long-term emphasis on rationality, has a greater perceptive space of the investigation of matters beyond rationality. So, in the pursuit of materialism and sensitized vision, eastern and western art seem to go together. This surface resemblance is actually concealing the different focal points in the development of eastern and western art as well as their respective limitations.
Of course artists can ignore the divergences between eastern and western art, thought and go their own ways to deal with their own unilateral work. But to consider this partiality in regards to Hua Qing, an artist who has traveled between east and west, one must make one’s own discreet choices. He takes visual projection to an even older and broader history of the developmental history of humans, attempting to draw from it neither the developmental laws or contradictory paradoxes of eastern nor western, but of civilization itself, and hence it enters the domain of contemporary art.
Hence we see the appearance of the anthropoid form, with the broad skull of an ape and a strong body, but lacking the glimmer of human enlightenment in its eyes. No matter if it is squatting, walking or running, in the background there are extracts from the formulas of Newtonian physics, a draft of the declaration of human rights, or Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity appearing. These world-recognized classic theories are epoch-making contributions to the history of the development of human civilization. They accompany the form of the simian man, contrasting with the allegorical nature of this figure. That is to say, by making the anthropoid the important object in his own painting, it appears as if he is departing from the classics. Exceeding all expectations, it is actually a kind of borrowed allegory, using the technique of personification. This sort of allegorical technique uses a single kind of animal anthropoid as its object, removing the previously used arrangement of the landscape to increase the narrative technique of the painting. But, this elimination of narrative does not have the influence of crippling the painting form because the artist boldly uses the rich expressive forms of piled, crowded, shaved and scraped red pigment to bring out the sturdy and healthy form of the anthropoid in extremely strong painting. Real daily life materials were not chosen, but instead a non-realistic and abstractly symbolic form was chosen. A human form was not chosen as the object, and instead a very-near-to-human anthropoid is the object. Hua Qing consciously pierces though all of beings in the so-called immediate materialized civilized world and makes his own focal point the origin of man’s remote

antiquity, focusing on the genesis moment of primal human civilization. This obviously is an attempt to conquer the conflicting divergences in every artist created by the difference between the western and eastern cultural development processes, and hence it looks back on and confronted the status quo and progress of contemporary foreign civilizations.
The anthropoid form becomes the important object of Hua Qing’s painting. This seems like a regression in visual forms, but in fact is manner of recollection that announces the so-called "civilization", "progress" and "philosophy" of human development, as well as "ideology" and other rationalist concepts and preached theories that are the standard inhibitors of man. It impels people to reflect on the predicament that contemporary human society faces: the high speed development of human civilization, which on one hand allows people to follow their desires, and to raise primitive animals to ideal control, the real level of civilized human society; on the other hand, because of the striving for change and speed under this rational arrangement, it allows the undesired proliferation of massacres between different countries, ethnic groups and social classes. That is to say, because the civilization made by man is nowadays uncontrolled and misused, man himself has brought disastrous results to civilization.
Moreover, the form of the anthropoid is replicated in Hua Qing’s painting. It also testifies to the importance attached to human perception of the body in the contemporary art and academic worlds. For a long period of time animal forms were given a highly developed consideration by modern man in life totems and hunting articles, symbolizing wealth as social environment accessories. That is to say, no matter whether from the perspective of religion, symbolism, aesthetics or science, when people look at and analyze animal forms it is always from a human perspective and stance, always from a bottom line of controlling them with human rationality and power. They are animal forms under the will and reason of man, the separation that has long divided man and animal. But the problem lies in that man is also developed from animals. Aside from a metaphysics founded on thought and rationality there is also a perception based around the body and animal form. In other words man is a united form of both conscious thought and physical perception. But, after Plato’s thoughts about the rise of the spirit and the flesh, especially present in Descartes’ philosophical model of the opposition of the consciousness and the body, western thought has promoted consciousness of thought and restrained the tradition of physical perception. The human body and the animal form are related, but both are base and coarse and only intellect and consciousness are noble and eternal.
Only in the consumer period after the Second World War has the orientation of human values towards vulgarized appearances become increasingly dense and serious, urging western scholars to begin a serious and conscientious consideration. They began from various paths of research, and in the end traced it to Nietzsche, and to various degrees discovered and elaborated on the pluralism of modern and contemporary cultural values and all that secularization implies towards the importance placed on perception of the animal form of the body.
It is only now, as far as human society is concerned, that the relationship between man and animal has a relationship of non-correlation between the self and the other. Man is not only the result of consciousness and thought, but also a result of the animal. Therefore, the relationship between man and animal and the artworks of animal form that man creates are no longer always expressing man’s wisdom and rationality, the noble and superior oppositional duality between man and animal (its background in a concept of man versus the outer world).?
Animals are no longer docile and cute supporting roles as before, but have their own behaviors, dispositions and nature. Just as in the anthropoid of Hua Qing. You can say it is an animal, but you can also say it is man. Consequently he is a mixed form, in a state of expressing his gamut of human emotions as well as body language in painting.? His portrayal by Hua Qing also conversely portrays Hua Qing and us, the audience. It makes us aware of the significance of the exchanges of the animal body and not simply the importance attached to rational consciousness.
Thus it can be see that in regard to Hua Qing, the anthropoid form bears a great deal of the profound meaning of "broad and deep philosophical thought" and "the deep layer of the long term course of history". He takes great pains to repeatedly sketch this red anthropoid, attempting, by means of this combined man of remote antiquity and the animal, to rethink the contemporary vulgarized reality of life. He also contributes his own insubstantiality towards his surroundings and gradual separation from the judgment of man. For the audience, confronting these huge and agile anthropoid forms seems like listening closely to the doctrines of long lost mystical profundities. They evolve from remote antiquity, and are now again within reach, triggering our thoughts, and arousing our bodily perception, because these forms and our selves are far too similar in reality. In confronting these forms, how then do we distinctly differentiate between the symbols of ethnic status, national characteristics and regionalisms? They all appear excessively specific and superfluous.
February 12-13, 2008

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Asia Art Center(Beijing)

Duration:2008.3.22 ~ 2008.4.20

Hua Qing's paintings are very much like the man himself - making silent yet sharp and precise observations about our surroundings. As man loses control over his momentum trying to brace himself to face the fast, rapid changes of the world, Hua Qing has chosen to confront these changes in a calm and unhurried manner, meanwhile encouraging us to do a self-introspection to ponder upon our essential qualities that we are slowly losing.

Hua Qing hails from among the pioneer batch of artists to inhabit Yuanmingyuan. Over the past two decades, he has focused on expounding his artistic language and creative thinking. The "Red Ape" has become a representative symbol of his. He has reverted man into the red ape - the primitive form of man - to arouse from within us the primitive force residing in our inner soul, so as to arm ourselves with sufficient sincerity and courage to reflect upon the modern commercial society's so-called civilization of today. The Ape, or the primitive man, is used as a means to highlight the transformation process of today's society in an attempt to seek the Truth. He (it) has transcended the domains of humanities, science and philosophy. Huaqing's creative process, as depiced by the apes in his paintings, is an attempt to seek the Truth. In an increasingly complex society which has deviated from its intrinsic nature, the ape is construed as the primitive form of man, to reveal the evolutionary process of human civilization. The primitive ape in his paintings and the reconaissance of humanities and philosophical thinking are manifested as images that reveal both past and current dialectic thoughts.

At the first instance, Hua Qing's painting of the ape manifests its existence through its intense gaze and primitive passion that overwhelms us, yet upon closer scrutiny, we discover that the ape's gaze has outshone the presence of and broken away from its primitive body. The look is a sharp, pondering and critical examination of the current state of affairs. The various "man-like" positions assumed by the ape: sitting, lying, walking and being deep in thought reveal a state of deep contemplation. The ape's sharp gaze is focused upon the Truth that lies ahead. Its strides follow the path leading towards the Truth. Its fingers are almost pointing out at the Truth. Amidst increasingly complex times and rapid changes, Hua Qing has used his art to peel off the unnecessary outer layers of man's cassocks to reveal the true nature of the evolution of human civilization.

Pertinent issues addressing the ultimate concerns of mankind such as deliberations on life and death, the extrication of oneself from the vicissitudes of life and spiritualism are Hua Qing's favorite themes. As we transcend time to look back on the long evolutionary history of mankind, we are brought back to innocent antiquity and would ponder upon today's commercial society and man calmly and with confidence.

As we welcome the early spring of 2008, AAC cordially invites you to join us and venture into the world of man's evolutionary history as depicted by Hua Qing and regain innocence while we reflect upon our past and embrace the new age in our resolute stride towards the future.