Huang Rui was born in 1952 in Beijing, and is a well known Chinese avant-garde artist and a founding member of the “Star Movement”. This group of artists, numbering at least twenty and including such figures as Ai Weiwei and Wang Keping, were one of the first publically active art groups to protest government censorship following the end of the Cultural Revolution. Before founding the “Stars” group he had at the age of 16 been sent to Inner Mongolia to work as a farmer before returning to Beijing in 1975. The group held one of the first modern art shows in China in 1979 at the China Arts Gallery (now the National Museum of China) in Beijing, which on the third day was shut down by police. In 1984, a year after the group dissolved, Huang immigrated to Japan where he remained until 2000. He returned to China in 2002.
He writes that “in a flash, it has been thirty years since I befriended Mrs. King. In my eyes since the 1990s and into the 21st century, Mrs. King has been a paragon in the Chinese [art] world.” Alisan Fine Arts began representing Huang in 1990 while he was living in Japan, organising a solo exhibition of his abstract oil paintings and mixed media on canvas works in 1991. The gallery also included his artworks in two important group exhibitions Wonders of Chinese Abstraction in 1995, and Chinese Abstraction & Beyond in 1997 held at the Hong Kong Arts Centre.
Huang has held over thirty solo exhibitions and more than a hundred group exhibitions around the world. Recent major exhibitions include The First Guangzhou Triennial at Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou in 2002, Huang Rui: The Stars Times 1977-1984 at He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen in 2007, Christian Dior & Chinese Artists at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing in 2008, Venice Biennale 2013, Light Before Dawn: Unofficial Chinese Art 1974-1985 at Asia Society Gallery Hong Kong, Agitprop! at Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, and M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art Hong Kong in 2016. His works have been collected by M+, West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
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SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2018
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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
2004 798 in Beijing, Timezone 8 + Thinking Hands
2005 Language/Fable, Timezone 8 + Thinking Hands
2006 Beijing / Background, Timezone 8 + Thinking Hands
2007 798 in Beijing, New Edition, Timezone 8 + Thinking Hands
