For its fourth year participating in Dallas Art Fair, Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to present a solo booth of paintings and works on paper by Chris Huen Sin Kan. The presentation brings together Huen’s last paintings executed in his birthplace of Hong Kong and some of the first works made since he moved to London earlier this year.
Amidst the unrelenting bustle of the artist’s hometown of Hong Kong, Huen built himself a quiet life creating works that celebrate the quotidian and the fleeting. Huen’s paintings capture the people and surroundings that shape his daily life, often featuring a choice group of recurring characters, including his family and dogs. The compositions of Huen’s large-scale paintings evolve organically and haphazardly as the artist layers one dab of paint over another until the pattern on the canvas perfectly expresses the spirit of the scene. Huen likens his process to the unscripted experience of daily life, seeking to eternalise the minute and the transient from feeling and memory in works that appear to blossom spontaneously.
In Spring 2021, Huen relocated with his family to London, prompting a distinctive visual shift in the content of his work. The paintings at Dallas Art Fair capture the transition from the compact space of Huen’s modern Hong Kong apartment, represented by dark hues of grey, blue, and black, to his new surroundings in a Victorian townhouse, with its distinctive features and leafy garden, depicted in a softer, more tonal pallet of greens, pinks, and yellows. In the process of making these recent works, Huen has noted how simple adjustments to his life such as visiting local parks in South West London in which his children and dogs can play – a rarity in the dense, humid metropolis of Hong Kong – has led him to reconsider the ways in which he observes his surroundings and brought about more freedom in the ways he seeks to express these feelings in his work.
