A brush with fame

The work is meditative as much as spiritual, and benefits from the natural world as its primary subject.

The artist, in so doing, takes the narrative of the passage of time and places at the heart of all he creates.

In a world devoid of people, the natural world is tamed.

Much as Buddhist doctrine enshrines life with the responsibilities of death, the work of Huang Youwei places death into the hands of life.

The work expresses that life is beautiful precisely because it is fleeting, one passing moment piled on another, an end always drawn as a new beginning.

While the work is often photorealistic, it is so with artistic license. Edges blur with emotional rendering, colors over-tinted with the zeal of a lover's eye.

The feel and sense of the subject, like a single rose amidst a white and purple rush of water, is elevated to the stature of the divine - a lover working with a steady brush.

The world of the artist's imagination does not remove people from the subject but instead imagines a still moment in time's arrow.

It is as if this moment, launched from the artist's imagination to the crafted beauty of his page, is somehow positioned between the many other moments of human confluence and departure.

The scene involves human disappearance. And it is the absence of these people that makes the beauty rare that in turn exposes the absent presence in all of nature.

(China Daily 03/13/2008 page24)