Earl Jiannan Huang - Nobility, Art, and a Masterful Style

Earl Jiannan Huang (nickname is Miaojian, pen name is Gengfu). Earl Jiannan Huang, is a university professor, currently living in Beijing. Huang was honored by the royal family in Indonesia with Knighthood and given the title of "Earl" for his contributions to the art world and humanity. He has exceptional skills at oil painting, Zen Chinese painting, and ceramic painting. His artwork has been shown all over the world, across China, and shown at many international art exhibitions where he has won many awards. He has been interviewed by many news organizations and has appeared as a guest on TV shows on CCTV, Beijing TV, Shandong TV, Hebei TV, Guangxi TV, Zhou Zheng Show, The Beverly Arts, The Beverly News, and HTTV (Chinese American Television).

Huang is currently the executive vice chairman of the Asian Cultural Artists Joint Center, the Graduate School of Tsinghua University (part-time professor and researcher), and a part-time professor in the School of Design and Art of Shandong University of Science and Technology. He is also the Executive Vice President of China Academy of Painting and Calligraphy; Dean of Chinese National Academy of Chinese Enterprises; Vice Chairman of China Zen Art Painting and Calligraphy Artists Association; Master of Chinese Zen Chinese Painting; Member of Creative Center Committee of China Artists Association; Deputy Director and Secretary of Oil Painting Committee of China Artists Exchange Association Director; Director of China Arts and Crafts Association; and Standing Director of China Calligraphy and Painting Association.

Earl Jiannan Huang is currently the only artist who has appeared on the Hurun Art List (Chinese version of Forbes List ) for six consecutive years in both oil and traditional Chinese painting. Huang is ranked 21st in the “Top 500 Global Contemporary Artists” of Artprice, an authoritative website for European and American art. At the same time, Huang Jiannan is also one of the few Chinese artists to be included in the "Beverly Arts Certified artists “ and “Nominated to be the first of 2021 LABA 100 Most Global influential Artists Icon Awards”. Because of his perfect combination of Chinese painting and Western oil painting, he is sometimes called an "Oriental Monet" or a Chinese contemporary of the well-known Dutch-American abstract expressionism artist Willem de Kooning. 

After Jiannan Huang’s first teacher Guan Shanyue, Master of Chinese painting, Huang went on to study the art of painting. His early style combined the essence of Monet, Wu Guanzhong, Jia Youfu, Dai Ze, Yao Zhihua and other predecessor art masters to combine his oil painting and Chinese painting with romantic and modern elements. Huang's paintings expressed a scene with vivid colors on canvas and rice paper, and carried out the "marriage" of ink, fantasy, and reality. Huang's artwork breaks the original colors and patterns of Chinese landscape paintings, as he uses bold colors to create the common scenes of mountains and rivers. The colors are often very bright, but not gaudy, and sometimes his artworks are spectacular visually as he expresses vivid transformations of reality. From his work, you can see that he loves nature and is very skilled at the use of light and shadow. His use of powerful colors transforms a scene and gives it a deeper, honest, more instinctive inner meaning.

In his early days, Jiannan Huang walked more than 38,000 kilometers in nine years, traveling all over the country and abroad, traveling all over the country, going deep into desert villages and towns to experience life, and make a living by painting. Through his personal life experience, he injects his infinite enthusiasm and deep love for this land into the paintings, and he uses his heart to experience life through sketching, and integrates the experience and feelings of the soul into his works, creating vivid, moving and living works. His landscape sketching works create a realm of aesthetics and thoughts that blends scenery and harmony between man and nature, and an extremely beautiful landscape writing business environment.

In his works, the colors in the oil paintings are based on western influences, but the clouds, water, fog, and other elements are often based on the styles and flows of traditional Chinese paintings. Huang likes to explore the new styles of painting and often combines the charm of traditional Chinese painting techniques with his own secrets of new things, so that the content of his work continues to evolve and is changed considerably for his new works.

In the eyes of many people, Jiannan Huang’s painting style is very different. Oil portraits are as splashy as Chinese paintings, and Chinese portraits are beautiful as oil paintings. There is sometimes no discipline in the composition. Time and space can drift in the picture, and the image created has strong visual impact. In fact, every painting has its own unique ideological foundation hidden in it. They are derived from life, but the creative methods that break the convention and innovate are given new vitality.

Jiannan Huang works break the conventional creative methods of the academic school, and use the expressive means of transcendentalism to boldly exaggerate, reflecting his subjective reveries about natural objects. With concise shapes, pure colors, the strongest complementary colors and ideal colors impact the viewer's vision, just like a wild animal world. Some colors are close to roaring, some are peaceful and quiet, and some are full of romance. Perhaps his innocent and persistent temperament is very close to that of Henri Matisse, one of the greatest colorists of his time, so his color style is full of variety - boldness, contrast, peacefulness, and sometimes creating tension and emotion at the same time.

Huang's traditional Chinese paintings are based on the contemporary basis to learn, learn from, explore and digest traditions. He positioned his Chinese painting as heavy-color ink and wash landscape painting. Contemporary Chinese color ink paintings require the painter to grasp the pulse of the times with the historical perspective and the wisdom of philosophers, listen to the heartbeat of the universe, pay attention to the destiny of mankind, insight into society, and understand life. After a long period of painstaking efforts, Huang splattered ink and color on the scroll like splashed ink. This new painting technique combining ink and color is still very rare in contemporary times. Huang has subtly integrated the painting skills of oil painting into the style of traditional Chinese ink painting, forming his own unique artistic style of Chinese painting.

Mr. Michel King, Chairman of the French Artists Association, once watched a Chinese painting by Huang Jiannan in the Louvre Museum, and said with emotion: “Among the artists I look at, Chinese paintings often have an illusion." The paintings are almost the same as those painted by a single person. The Chinese paintings today are almost the same as those painted 500 years ago. Today I finally saw a different kind of Chinese painting by Jiannan Huang. Seeing Huang's paintings and his unique style has changed my views on Chinese painting, views that I have had for over 50 years.

Artists often have it, but art masters don't often have the pioneering instinct to go outside the boundaries of tradition. The reason why the master of art is called the master of art is that not only doe the artist have outstanding artistic talents, but also innovates and blends the past with their own unique style and is recognized for their artistic achievements. Earl Jiannan Huang is a commendable master of art and honored for his many contributions to the world of Chinese and contemporary art.