INTERVIEW WITH RUOXI HUA
Ruoxi Hua is an emerging narrative figure artist who expresses his subjects in drawing, paintings, and prints. He is currently a senior studio art major candidate at the College of William & Mary, where he is also working towards a degree in Biology. Over the past year, Hua has shown in four exhibitions and is the recipient of the Joseph Palin Thorley Memorial Scholarship and the Caitlin Memorial Scholarship. Most notably, he received the 3rd place in “2nd Annual Greatest Students Exhibition” by The In-Art Gallery.
JLM: We love the pieces in the show. I guess we'll just start with some questions for you. Can you tell me about your background in art, how you started and who your influences were early on?
RH: Before I started creating these pieces I think my primary influences were the old masters like David, Poussin and Caravaggio because I really love the neoclassical sort of composition. I'm really fascinated by how these figures can be put into places and start a narrative. I'm also influenced by artists like HR Giger. He's the concept artist for Alien. am interested sometimes in how to create a sense of a gloomy, terrifying feeling psychologically.
JLM: Oh, yeah. I really like that idea. Have you read a lot about psychology?
RH: Not really but I did read some aesthetics on how things that are mysterious could create a kind of terrifying feeling, the feeling of sublime, and also a feeling of the uncanny. . I read something but I did not do a lot of research into it.
JLM: Okay. Right. Right. It just came intuitively or instinctually from your experiences over the years.
RH: Yes
JLM: Do you feel like it's very personal, is there some sort of personal root in some of the imagery you create?
RH: I would say I try to make my work as seemingly as little personal as possible, but I think in terms of the way I'm composing my work, the way I'm executing things I think it is personal in some sense. Because I think there is some charm about these multi figural paintings about their sense of epicness.
I read a lot of literature. I'm really obsessed with this idea of how you can bring these little parts together to create a whole world.
JLM:. You were talking about the mystery of how to bring these mysteries into being. I found that intriguing. Can you elaborate on that?
RH: Mystery for me maybe comes from two sources. One is as I talked about. I looked at science-fiction sources where it has these monsters or these things that create fear in us, but also another part is how early on I really liked surrealism. I think they also have this kind of deep, related, subconsciously psychological kind of feeling. Especially in my painting, I'm thinking about how to bring a kind of extraterrestrial design that's organic to give the viewer a feeling of both theatricality and a sense of mystery and exoticness.
JLM: Yes. Exoticness and something kind of alien to them, that the viewer needs to delve into. Do you have David Campbell?
RH: Yes. Currently yes.
JLM: Has he inspired you in some ways too by his work or his teaching?
RH: I work with both Professor Lee and Professor Campbell. Before my senior year, I worked predominately with Professor Lee, but I think both professors, inspired me to look at the composition, to look at something that's deeper than just illustrating the form, than just telling a story.
Because sometimes for visual art the story is important but I think what's more profound is how you compose and the structure of the painting, and how the color relationship work.
JLM: What were some of the most interesting insights you received from these professors, insights that stand out from either one?
RH: I think the biggest insight I received from professor Lee is to perceive the picture as like a 2D surface, which is derived from impressionism, and which I don't necessarily have the highest sympathy for but for me it's a very useful tool to see a painting. Before I came to college if I looked at a painting I would just focus on the subject matter. I would just be like, "Hey. This is probably someone from Greek mythology or from the Bible." I would not focus on, "Hey, this painting is such-and-such composed, and why is it so beautiful?" I think how they inspired me the most is to see the painting as a painting. . See, I like to work with the representational subject matter with a sense of narrative. There's this antagonism between painting for painting or wanting to represent something, Inside me at least.
JLM: Okay. Yes. David Campbell exhibited a piece here that was very much inspired by Dali. It was a bison with a person running across a plane. It reminded me of Spellbound the dream sequence from Spellbound. Have you seen that?
Did David Campbell have some sort of insight into surrealism? I'm just curious how he influenced you.
RH: I think because when professor Campbell started working with me I was already in advanced painting so he focused more on bringing what I'm more interested in but I did look at some of his work. I looked at his early work. He would put out these stick figures and paint those stick figures in a certain light setting. I think that's very interesting. I think that's a very good way to do inventive stuff. I think that would be a good inspiration.
JLM: Can you comment on your self-portrait?
Ruoxi Hua,Self-Portrait, 2021, Oil on canvas mounted to panel, 20” x 16”
RH: I think that's more in line with our school's teaching relatively speaking. I think for that one I didn't expect it to be that resolved actually. It started with really brushy and loose feelings because over the years my problem has been that I'm too focused on details because I started drawing much earlier than I started to paint. When I go in with painting I use the mindset of drawing, so I tend to illustrate every detail, focus more on value than temperature and color. Over the year I think Professor Lee and Professor Campbell have asked me to just let it all go and focus more on the relationship of color, the relationship of temperature, to focus the painting on a whole. To be more carefree in a sense. I think I started that painting that way. I think it was more sort of brushy, less illustrated. But then I worked on it. Oh, by the way, the painting's inspiration is from the British painter Stanley Spencer. There is one painting of him. He is standing against the window and he's doing some very religious kind of pose. I think that seems like a really cool idea for me because it's a really good way to combine the figure with the interior ... It has a minimal sense of narration. Yeah. That's where I got my inspiration from. Then as I started correcting things, adding more stuff, I arrive at the hand. . The hand just clicked for me. Then I looked at a painting. I said, "Well, the hand is so detailed, executed. Now I have to bring everything up to that level." Therefore that painting came to be.
JLM: I'm very intrigued by the painting. I think it looks like Putin. It's in the water. It's like a figure in the water. . Can you comment on that piece?
It's just this odd kind of timely feeling because it's this figure in the water with figures around. It reminds me of the war anyway, but it reminds me a little bit of that when I saw it, it's this figure. Probably that wasn't your interpretation but that's bringing the idea of something timely to what's happening into a painting to me.
RH: That painting is actually within the same series as the one that's behind you. It's the third scene. Actually, I should have notated that. The story behind this whole series... The series is not completed. I'm actually only halfway done and I don't know if I'm going to complete it or not, but I do have the whole story arch.
Basically, the whole story is that this is on an alien planet. There are all kinds of issues. In that painting, there are all kinds of problems with people fighting and there's slavery. There's bullying. Then, somebody, some crazy prophet says a savior is going to come from the sky and just save us all. People think he is deranged. This is really like a little satirical parody on the Bible but has a modern take. Then the second scene which is the beach one, it's the mother paralleled to the virgin. The savior character just gradually grew out of her. Then this third scene, I think this is a parallel to the temptation by the devil where this savior character saw a hallucination. In the hallucination, he sees this horrifying scene with the planets dweller's psyche all surrounding him, sort of ghastly figures. What I actually wanted to get across in this piece is this confrontation between the modern which is so pervaded by this kind of nihilism with the classic which is
Classic not in the sense of style or historical background but classic in the sense that there is one universal sort of truth that everybody would believe or adhere to as a society. I think there is this really interesting confrontation between them. I think this is actually happening in the contemporary world right now.
JLM: That's great. That's very intriguing. I like that. It's a satirical take on the Bible in some ways. Is there anything else about... Tell me about the figure in the back. Is there any interesting kind of background information about that particular painting, how it was painted, or how it came to be for different experiments on it? Did you paint it quickly, or were there certain different iterations of it that came through as you painted it?
Ruoxi Hua, Scene I: A Panorama of Life on Achernar, oil on canvas, 18” x 24”. PURCHASE
RH: Yeah. I can tell you more about the process. To be honest, this is actually my first ever inventive painting, so this is an extremely challenging painting for me. I didn't paint it fast. I painted very slowly. It took me a month to finish it. I think I started with a very simple design with the figures...
There were only eight figures on the plane very similar to Dali. It's just figures on a single plane. All of them have these very weird poses but you can see how they're is a problem. Each of them is doing something to each other. But then it came across that it's not as compelling as just the whole street view of people First I started to further design, the gesture and the details of the main characters which, as you can see is actually the six front-most figures and also the one in the red coat in the back. He's the crazy prophet who says, "Oh. He's going to come and save us all." I started with them and then I used the aid of the perspective system. Then I started going in with the architecture. The architecture is definitely very heavily inspired by surrealism. I wanted the architecture to look not mechanical but very organic and very sexual in a sense, very human bodily, I mean just to play with this idea. I used the tiled flooring because it's really theatrical. I think it looks like a stage. It doesn't look like a common exterior space because it's not very common to have this kind of flooring in an exterior space. Also I think this kind of pattern reminds people of the old comedians like Harley Quinn who wear these diamond-shaped patterns. That's also a consideration.
JLM: I think it works very, very well. Your color choices in this painting, how did you map out your colors for this? They've got really interesting... Can you talk a little bit more about color in your work?
RH: Yeah, definitely. I started with a three-color design which I've now discarded. Unfortunately, we will never see them again. But I started with three choices. The first is very saturated, everything out there color. Very colorful. Fauvist. The second one is this one. It still has color but is a little bit toned down.
The third one is more black and white with very minimal temperature shifting. I definitely didn't like the first one. I was choosing between the second and third one. When I used black and white it looks very heavy and very gloomy which is the kind of feeling that I want. But end the end I decide to use the one with toned-down color. Color always has a stronger effect and it makes the painting richer in a way. I wanted the gloominess, the heaviness to just slowly come out instead of just coming right at the audience at the first moment
JLM Can you talk about your interpretation of the sublime in art?
RH: I take sublime as the most popular explanation of it, being a sense of you're overcome. You're overwhelmed with what you're experiencing because you cannot comprehend what's going on. Sublime can either be like a large, spectacular, overpowering being, or scenery or landscape or it could be something psychological. It could be something like Kafka's Castle. It could be something that you just cannot comprehend. You can never get there. It's just this mysterious overshadowing sort of facility that's affecting your life in a way. Yeah. I think that's my take on the sublime.
I can talk about the sublime in relation to the fifth piece of this series which did not happen yet. The fifth piece is comprised of the savior which is a very small character in the corner, and a large sort of alien computer flowing behind it. It's a huge wall of just people's faces. It's definitely more of a surreal scene, but it is this confrontation of this teeny tiny little figure trying to confront this whole planet of people that are large, that is like a wall. It's basically like a very tall wall. I intended for the light to be dim so that it really looks like the wall is very impenetrable. That's what I meant by the sublime.
JLM. Tell me about the drawings
Title: The Four Horsemen: Plague
Dimension: 11” x 14”
Medium: Graphite on paper
Date: 2022
RH: The drawing is definitely like a reflection upon the painting because as I said this painting is my first trial on totally inventing a whole complete space and a whole worldview, and my first time inventing color. There are a lot of naïve things about this series that I wish could just be more mature. This drawing series is just a reflection upon how to work as a series, After the epic stuff, I did for that first painting I just wanted to calm down and focus on a little bit more manageable things. Actually, I did not plan them to be graphite drawings. I initially planned them to be prints. But my original design, I started with the horseman plague for the original design, which I just finished this morning before this interview. But then it didn't work out at that time. then I spent the following two months just stopping and coming back to work on it every once in a while to just polish up the idea for each one. Then I started to have this kind of idea of what the four horsemen are, and how to design the four horsemen without it being a cliché. Because it is a very heavily explored topic or subject matter in art. What I ended up deciding is that I want the four horsemen to be relevant to this specific time, but not so specific to fall into the category of social commentary. I just did a modern retake on what the Four Horsemen stands for.
Another thing is that when I work on the painting series I always have this mindset that each individual piece has to conform to the whole. When I do the second piece my mind is inevitably constrained by what I did for the first. Then in the end when I'm done with my third piece I discover that it is really not a very healthy mindset to do a series because I lost a lot of passion and frenshness for the subsequent pieces.
For the Four Horsemen, I think I've become bolder with the execution and the kind of attitude I'm doing with each piece. I think you can see actually the checkerboard when it's behind you, the first one. I'm trying slightly different things in each of them and I think I learned from the mistake from the previous one to develop the next one. I'm really enjoying this process more than the ones I did with the painting.
JLM: Okay. I really like the death one. Can you comment on it?
RH: Yes. I think for some reason a lot of people like that. The death, I didn't take death as its literal meaning but sort of like death as losing your individuality and becoming zombified. Because I sort of used this cheesy pop culture zombies to relate to death, but also it's very satirical... The thing I want to focus on in this Four Horsemen series is satire and dark humor more so than the Alien series. For the death, I think I wanted to create this kind of tension and, what's the word, disconnection between the speaker, the politician, or anything you want to imagine. I don't want to over-explain it but I want to create this connection between the speaker and the audience. I think he's definitely doing a grand speech. He has these gestures going on. The spotlight and everything. It's very dramatic. Very intense. He's in an intense moment, whereas the audience is just lying there. They are mesmerized, and I think they're halfway dead already. That's why I think what death in this one means. Also, I think formal wise in this drawing... What I really like about this drawing is that I'm starting to be daring to sacrifice some of the illustration in favor of the whole feeling of the painting, the whole light and dark, the whole effect. Because as you can see the figures in the dark, it's very ambiguous. It's very mysterious. It's not very heavily drawn, but in the end, the whole thing works.
JLM: Yes. Yes. Definitely. I love the dark. Have you seen the movie A Face in the Crowd?
RH: Oh, no.
JLM: Oh, well you should see that. It's kind of interesting. It covers some of the same topics and it's kind of dark humor. It's from the late '50s. Would you comment on the other two? The famine one is interesting with the bicycle pump. What was your thinking on that one?
RH: What I'm thinking is the inspiration actually comes from a very early digital drawing of mine. The drawing is very simple, and it's kind of cheesy and poppy. But it is about these figures all made of balloons. Then they're in the lines, and they're pumping gas into each other. But the very wrinkled and deflated ones are pumping gas into the very overinflated ones. This could be used to a lot of topics I guess about people who are deprived of something is ironically giving more what they're deprived of to the people who are already overinflated with that kind of stuff. Whether it's attention, wealth, social status, power. It could also relate back to what we talked about, sublime I guess. It cannot be overcome. What's more satirical is that these figures are surrounding him. The only difference between them and the gas figure is that the gas figure is not actually that different from them. They just have a bunch of gas and ability to make him look more puffed. The reason I used a gas pump is really to say that there is not much difference between the inflated figure in contrast to those really skinny ones. It's just one is pumped with air and has nothing inside, and the others really also have nothing inside, even without air. I think what I want to say is that in the end they are the same thing. It's just maybe one gets lucky and becomes different than the others.
JLM: Right. Okay. I guess we should talk about the third one here. The face, what inspired you with the expressions of the face? . Did you have any reference of a face, or is it primarily from the imagination?
RH: I drew it from my face. I did not completely just copy my face onto that. I draw that face inventively, and then I use my own face as a reference to just adding that structural solidity. It doesn't look that much the same which is a good thing. I start with the idea of the checkerboard. The original plan for this drawing is actually very similar to the one of the painting, but then I thought I already did that once, and let me just do something else. In the end instead of a bunch of people who are actually fighting a street, I choose to represent them on a checkerboard which is satire, but it's also a very commonly used subject matter of representing people on a checkerboard. Then I added this figure that's grinning because he's the horseman apparently. This grin of insanity on this face. But I think it's good because it makes him look very sinister, and with all the [inaudible 00:47:07] on there. I think this one more than the other is more connected to the real-world problem which I have mixed feelings about. This grin of insanity on this face. But I think it's good because it makes him look very sinister.. I think this one more than the other is more connected to the real-world problem which I have mixed feelings about. But in the end I think what I wanted to get across is that the war is kind of this very complex event where different sides of people just cannot really understand each other. There's such a huge gap in between them. Then also you really cannot tell who is responsible for the war. They are all, in the end, contributing to what's going to happen. No matter whether it's a natural war or whether it is like a division or any kind of conflict. The thing about the horsemen in this one is that I think the horsemen is supposed... When I finished this piece I'm reflecting upon it and I thought to myself, "Hey, this is a really childish representation of a war actually." Because in the end, because for the actual war there is nobody in the backdrop that's manipulating everything. It's all happening on the chessboard on its own spontaneously. It's like the chain of events. One thing causes the other. Then it's really hard to keep track. In the end it's really hard to describe something to a particular person. Then I thought maybe that adds more to the satirical because in the real world there's no evil grinning, sinister horseman that's manipulating the good kind people into fighting each other. I the end it's about the people themself fighting each other.
JLM: Right. Right. Right. But I was fascinated by what you were talking about this computer in your final painting. I'm very interested in seeing that kind of thing because that seemed very timely about the media and how we see things.
RH: Yeah. Definitely I'm thinking a little about the media when I conceived the idea, and also about the hive mind which is similar to what I did in the Four Horsemen Death, about how people's minds can be unified and do collective decisions that are so powerful. I have something to add to a previous question because you asked me whether my work is personal. I think there is at least one aspect of that that is personal is that I grew up in an age of the internet so there are a lot of things. I can see all of the world and I can see how people on the internet could interact in such a brand new way that I can never see before. I think sometimes internet allows me to see this kind of, like a group behavior that the inner mental and emotional needs of people that get redirected into violent act. I think that there are actually instances that happen to people around me. That's a really big shock to me because before I was just thinking it's something that's happening in news. What I observe is that we all have this inner aggression within ourselves that we're keeping hold of. It is really important to just keep it in check. Otherwise it's just going to run wild and cause a lot of crazy things.
JLM: You think there's hope, there's some way to attenuate this kind of thing into something that's a collective kind of rebirth or emergence of the order that people are progressing past the war?
RH: I don't know. I think this is a question too big for me to answer.
JLM: Yes.
RH: I'm just an artist. To a certain degree, I just paint what I see and what I feel. I don't really know where this is going. I think there is definitely good stuff about how information gets across so rapidly these days, and how much it affects our ways of viewing the world, of viewing people around us. It's just a really complicated thing that we still need to get more understanding of. That's just my take
