Episode III: Chris Huen Sin-kan, The Path and The Fog, Part I

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, July 2025

“Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the
past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their
faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all
the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he
sees their mistakes, but not the fog. And yet all of them [writers like
Heidegger and Mayakovsky] ... were walking in fog, and one might wonder:
who is more blind? Mayakovsky, who as he wrote his poem on Lenin did not
know where Leninism would lead? Or we, who judge him decades later and
do not see the fog that enveloped him?” (Milan Kundera, “Paths in the Fog”
in Testaments Betrayed (1993))

CHAPTER I: KUNDERA’S FOGGY PATH

The great Czech-French writer, Milan Kundera, wrote Testaments Betrayed
in 1993. Over the course of nine essays – each structured and discharged like novels so that ideas and propositions are ‘performed’ like characters (each of them famous novelists in this specific text) issuing dialogue (sometimes dialectic and even enlightened; other times consciously absurd) – Kundera explores the fragile yet fecund synergy that knits together art, memory and individuality: a delicate tempest set in a world – our world - that Kundera believed was prone to bias and trickery.

With the perfume of such contest hanging heavy in the air, Kundera’s text interrogates some of the great moral, aesthetic and philosophical trials of twentieth-century culture. In so doing he chronicles the ever-burgeoning eclipse of individualism, inflicted upon it by the increasing assumptions and subsumption of rabid collectives devoid of illumination. This giant ingurgitation of personal identity and lived experience thus serves to problematize our establishment - and understanding - of boundaries set between past, present and future. Pillars of time and place; perspicacity and hope; being and becoming now bleed into one inchoate amoeba of (often pained) expression, breathing with degrees of liberty, feeding off possibility and integrity but also entangled in nets of conspiracy and
mistruth. As it was; so, it is. One moment Kundera’s reader is offered the path of clear delineation and crystallisation of and for thought and pattern; another, they are shrouded in the soupy fog of mystery, obscurity and anxiety. The viewer’s task is to separate lucidity from quandary or obfuscation but to do that Kundera insists that you follow a path that forces you to confront such misty travails.

This is the path (and struggle) that Chris Huen Sin-kan has taken when creating his latest body of work; a path his viewer has no choice but to pursue. Eight monumental paintings, accompanied by five smaller works, make up the first part of a two-part presentation that Huen has called The Path and The Fog. Oxymoronic, yet inextricably linked, this picturesque notion of doubt yet resolution, inspired by Kundera, comes to life in Huen’s renditions of what he calls his ‘ordinary life’, but which are described with a brush that betrays the most exquisite, delicate artistry.

Whether we are invited to join a mother preparing food in her kitchen, accompanied by her daughter and their pet dog or join a second pet dog, seeking direction from us as to which way to run whilst on a woodland walk, Huen’s subjects and scenes remain steadfastly and deliberately mundane yet, in their execution, they marvel like magic. The artist’s path is the assimilation of his family and their life together with his desire to continuously chronicle that intimate shared experience; the prose of that desire and description ironically phrased by the most poetic mark-making.

The fog hums in such poetry, nourished by a gentle chaos that tries to stultify direction, clarity, navigation or agency, of both the artist’s craft and process and, by extension, his own self-determination. Who he was; what he is; where he is going: a mantra absorbed by every one of the artist’s always delectable, sometimes haunting, ever life-affirming brushstrokes.

CHAPTER II: A CONCERT OF CALLIGRAPHY

We begin with the mark because each individual touch contains the genetic code of Huen’s content and concept, both of which acknowledge yet inveigh against an Asian calligraphic tradition – of mark and gesture; voice and purpose – that is centuries old.

Chris Huen Sin-kan ,Balltsz, 2025, Oil on canvas 200 x 240 cm (78 3/4 x 94 1/2 in)

The monumental Balltsz (2025) delights upon first inspection as a ravishing symphony of saturated lavenders, indigos and purples yet it is a painting that unveils itself as a gentle flurry of abstract marks, cascading like petals adrift a soft breeze onto the artist’s composition, evincing a dreaminess of shape and form as they coalesce like memories. Huen’s dog occupies little of the pictorial space, which is instead devoted to an almost extravagant recital of the woods near the artist’s home in which Balltsz plays. Mark is broken down into single calyces of colour that gain emotional and compositional momentum as their propensity to tessellate (and thus encourage a narrative-driven read) increases, only for such
choreographic inclination to dissipate, abstracting surface (and thus content) like an ancient mosaic robbed of all its tiles by the vagaries of time. Huen’s emphasis on individual mark - like this landscape and the dog who frolics in it - here reveals the very arc of calligraphy: a language of gesture that strives for both simplicity and awareness, centred on a craft that establishes its own dominion outside of any concerns generated by the need for content, but which still whispers a presence that carries with it the memories, ambitions and failures of its past. Inside each of the artist’s strokes the path is swept for reality and registration yet it remains achingly, beautifully misty, offering chameleonic suggestion and possibility at every turn.

CHAPTER III: HUEN’S MISTY SPACES

Huen’s visual vocabulary, ebbing and flowing so seamlessly betweenshades of fact and fiction, past and present, memory and moment, thus nurtures paintings that the artist refers to as his ‘misty spaces’: stages upon which his all too familiar protagonists play out the gentle drama of their everyday lives but which, at times, generate a quiet discombobulation and even muffled melancholy. Space has become ‘misty’ not just because of Huen’s commitment to employing and developing such a flummoxed painterliness – an ornamentation-cum-signification born of the nexus of abstraction and figuration – but because, of late, he has
found his creative enterprise to be challenged (and thus coached) by a period he considers somewhat chaotic. Tess and Balltsz (2025) powerfully translates such turbulence with the two figures of the artist’s dog and daughter occupying space as if they are floating, pulled into the monumental composition by passages of negative, obsidian space, only to be propelled out of the picture plane by puzzling jigsaws of peachy pinks, sage greens and icy whites, all of which – commingled or segregated – serve to confess an ever-shifting ground, physically, temporally and
decoratively.

Chris Huen Sin-kan, Tess and Balltsz, 2025, Oil on canvas, 220 x 280 cm (86 5/8 x 110 1/4 in)

Huen’s discord stems from a sense of discoordination; the fog of being born, raised and educated in Hong Kong at odds with the path of his current life, in the United Kingdom, now some four years long. Indeed, this sense of ‘re-placement’ (as opposed to displacement) and the jitters that might generate chimes so beautifully here with Huen’s apparently skittish ‘scape, problematizing perspective, denying horizon and stretching and squishing space like a stress ball. In turn, this also strikes another chord with the concept of ‘dead reckoning’ whereby one’s position can be determined by a starting point, an estimated speed and direction over a certain period. Like this concept, Huen’s ‘misty spaces’ also try to understand where he is, where he has come from and where he is headed.

Paint becomes speed, accelerating and decelerating, directing and confusing in equal measure as the artist strives to locate himself – and share that experience - via the adagio or staccato of his brushwork. Paint navigating and articulating both the journey and the destination, recording the melody and maelstrom of a life both lost and found, discovered yet still falling between the cracks of a fractured ground.

CHAPTER IV: INSIDE

Chris Huen Sin-kan, Tess, MuiMui and Joel, 2025, Oil on canvas, 200 x 240 cm (78 3/4 x 94 1/2 in)

This latest body of work sees Huen return to interior scenes. More than his recent displays of the woodlands around his home in East Sussex, where the artist and his family take their two dogs for regular walks and which he often describes in the loosest, abstract, most poetic manner, Huen’s interiors convey a certain reality. A phenomenological thrust at odds with the faerie-tale energy of his landscapes which, by extension and necessity, invests a certain ‘thingness’ to the artist’s description of rooms and his family in his home. The poetry of illusion, allusion and suggestion remains but is now coated with the prose of the usual and seemingly nondescript. Such is the case with Tess, MuiMui and Joel (2025). Tess at the breakfast table, her brother and their dog standing to her left, all confronting the viewer as if on their guard (as children are prone to do when meeting strangers), offering more inquisitiveness than disquiet, more scrutiny than smiles. Surrounding them is an environment peppered with props that, unlike the primordial tessellations of his exteriors, draw a certain and precise read from the scene he paints. Candlesticks, plates, light fixtures, a dog’s water bowl, a large plant, chairs, a wall-mounted mirror and a mobile explaining the orbit of the planets around the sun that tries its hardest to look like a sculpture by Alexander Calder all project their own understood reality, even as their description remains
typically abbreviated, even dislocated. Reality may be conveyed through the language of shape and invigorated by pivots of custom, but that reality is only alluded to so that any succour one secures from these familiar settings only reveals itself to be yet another set of wispy phantoms haunting another set of transparent dreams. What appears palpable only serves to question the very matrix of reality. The path of objective reality ever marbleized by the subjective fog of impression, expression and fiction and yet, curiously enough, Huen’s interior paintings are all based on his actual living spaces. Those walls really are yellow; the radiator sits exactly where he has painted it, even if his dog is not. Just
another twist in Huen’s tale of a life that follows a path most ordinary and yet which is arrived at by a painterly pursuit that is anything but.

CHAPTER V: OUTSIDE

If Huen’s interiors lay out his path in such a manner as to (try to) make matter fact then his exteriors do the exact opposite, eliciting surfaces and ‘scapes that resonate as pure abstractions (despite any figural engagement or association), championing pattern over personage; transcendence over terrain; poetry over prose. Where some of Huen’s interiors vibrate with heady palettes dominated by pinks and yellows, most of Huen’s exterior paintings are locked into a restrained and sophisticated spectrum of darker tones. Grounds of blacks, charcoals and woody chocolates are all invariably enlivened by acidic highlights of mint, lemon and jade greens, suggesting that the woodlands around Huen’s home – the playground for his two dogs – signify more than just the path of Nature.

Chris Huen Sin-kan, Haze and MuiMui, 2025, Oil on canvas, 240 x 400 cm (94 1/2 x 157 1/2 in)

These are depictions that truly corral the fog of the past and the dark shadows that ferment any rue of recollection and foment any subsequent itch of angst that beats inside it. Moreover, these depictions also see Huen continue to interrogate the usual ‘language’ of Asian ‘Scroll Paintings’ or, again, of calligraphy. Nature – so often the subject for so many Asian artists of the past – is thus upended both as content and process, both as sign and signifier.

Haze and MuiMui (2025), the largest painting in this exhibition, celebrates this foggier mood, driven by a drift of darkness that seeps out of a labyrinth of twisted, etiolated ebony trunks and branches, meandering across the composition like arteries pumping blood. Here the artist’s wife, Haze, is almost engulfed by the dark ground, with only her muted yellow top offering any hope for real recognition amidst this clawing of stygian planes. Likewise, the dog, pictured in profile, is executed almost entirely in blacks and greys so that the animal, so often described with such zesty animation, now melds into a background suffused with similarly umbral, nocturnal shades. Stasis now replaces action. The fog now creeps beyond the subliminal and into the open air of presence, moulding moment, fixing figures and bubbling like its own stream of consciousness, in the process becoming its very own path.

CHAPTER VI: A FAMILY OF CHARACTERS

Chris Huen Sin-kan, Haze, Tess and Balltsz, 2025, Oil on canvas, 200 x 240 cm (78 3/4 x 94 1/2 in)

The compass points of Huen’s experience are his wife, two children and two dogs. For several years now, Huen has cast them – and only them – in his paintings. Indeed, all his paintings in this extended period are titled using only the names of the family members it presents. Action or intent is of no concern; family and character are. By doing so Huen can cement his desire to unveil a life he considers decidedly ‘ordinary’ whilst simultaneously testing his intimacy of them and the ‘ordinariness’ of their lives together. This he does by undertaking deliberate strategies of estrangement, pushing what is known into spaces that throb with cryptic mystery, be that a dark copse that scintillates only in adumbral obscurity or, as in the case of Haze, Tess and Balltsz (2025), an environment whose familiarity, at first, is so seemingly comfortable as to exhibit nothing out
of the ordinary but which, upon lengthier contemplation and a slower gaze, extracts a gentle wobble of antagonism. Haze stands in her kitchen, intently performing a task that is not so clear to the viewer; her hands and arms reduced to ghoulishly grey silhouettes. Reflections shimmer away from metallic surfaces, bleeding into the air. Outside the dark blue sky of what would seem to be a sunny day is polluted by large, clambering trees, seen only in pitchy, shadowy, portentous silhouette. The kitchen seems to sway ever so slightly; a movement generated by Huen’s loose line and, specifically, by the tiled floor and walls that throw perspective so decidedly off kilter. The mood is unnerving and becomes
increasingly so the longer you stay with the work.

Chris Huen Sin-kan, MuiMui, 2025,Oil on canvas, 220 x 320 cm (86 5/8 x 126 in)

Family members thus function as both known, familiar agents, yet their agency of characterisation only really comes to life when navigating the unknown or the distempered known. It is in those moments that Huen is forced to navigate the fog of uncertainty as he attempts to lay a path forward for his family and truly arrive at a tried and tested authenticity. Character is here not to be confused with ‘objectness’ – the character of a thing in and for itself - but rather it unveils both the tumult and the triumph of his protagonists. The perspectival plunging kitchen in Haze, Tess and Balltsz (2025) shares the same rhythm of placement and displacement we find in the large MuiMui (2025). Occupying centre stage and pushed out of the pictorial space by a venerable tree, the dog directly confronts the viewer, ignoring the impossibly hemispherical ground in which it stands, recalling famous images of the now sadly felled Sycamore Gap tree in Northumberland near Hadrian’s Wall. The relationship between figure and ground operates not unlike David Hockney’s ‘photomontages’ from the 1970’s, where the assonance and dissonance of placement and displacement push against each other whilst curiously managing to harmonize and evince a Cubistic sense of simultaneity and presence. That distortion pulses here in the flattened crescent of forest, decorated with pretty taches of yellows, blues and lavenders, ironically
anchoring the dog compositionally yet shifting our point of view into the circus ring of psychological conundrum. The dog’s essence – its character rather than its familiarity – remains resolute and in so doing begs the viewer to ponder the structure, optics and mechanics of marking one’s path even as the billowing fog of deracination begins to broil inwards from behind the tree.

CHAPTER VII: COLOURING IDENTITY

As already noted, a recent development in Huen’s latest body of work is the continued use of a richer, more saturated palette. His usual white or creamy grounds (recently joined by opposite black versions) have now given way to mottled grounds of rose, sunny yellows, emeralds and apricot. Ethereal, opalescent tones that seem to embellish or ornament both surface and its signification, directly conducting the mood of his compositions. Such is the case in Tess and Haze (2025) where the artist’s wife and daughter relax in a living room resounding primarily in a medley of pink, mauve and lavender hues. The palette invests the space with an upbeat feeling but one that is somewhat reflective; a mood further engendered by the cosmic tessellation of marks that sweep across the back wall from right to left, denoting nothing but, perhaps, signifying a certain prismatic and paradigmatic shift of sign and seduction. Yet for all the poesy that zings in Huen’s choice of colour, it remains the fact that Huen’s living room is, indeed, pink. The choice of colour made for him but still allowing him to playfully interpret it within the orbit of his own enterprise. The irony being that his former use of a neutral ground, mute as negative space yet resurrected by the artist’s metamorphic mosaics of mark-making, is far more imaginative and conceptual than the space here which initially feels otherworldly yet remains rooted in reality.

Chris Huen Sin-kan, Balltsz, 2025, Oil on canvas, 160 x 200 cm (63 x 78 3/4 in)

Colour thus operates like identity; both being swells of being and space that gather fluctuating marks or shards of contrast that, in their congregation, act as synapses of otherness. Balltsz (2025) dominates the pictorial ground of a composition executed predominantly in greens with tiny flecks of buttercup or squiggles of white serving to decorate time yet also condense the emotional power of the dog’s presence and, of course, make manifest the artist’s own love for them. Identity – like authenticity and integrity – thus manages yet is controlled by the vicissitudes of the fog and the path it does not negate as much as negotiate. Balltsz’s presence – and the path carved out for them by Huen - is issued despite a lack of any perspective, boundary or modelling; despite the dog seeming to float across an elemental, metaphysical space; despite the artist’s
deliberate tonal switches of light and dark; despite the inchoate ground that only occasionally sparkles with firefly-like interventions. The fog is clearer here there than in any other of Huen’s monumental works. It resists, recoils, reinterprets any constructs of identity – sometimes with tension but oftentimes with a beauty that still smarts – yet the path here remains open and resolute. Huen’s final moment is Balltsz acknowledging the viewer and then, in the blink of an eye, they’re on the path and gone.

CHAPTER VIII: THE PATH AND THE FOG

Human experience is innately befuddled by clouds of inaccuracy. We all make many choices without ever really understanding the test and ramifications of such decisions. Chris Huen Sin-kan’s dazzling new body of work beautifully and poignantly adumbrates this, unravelling life as a constant navigation, weaving between pillars known and unknown, confronting boundaries of thought and provocation, being and becoming, that help us both engender and endure meaning. As we lay our paths for the future, full of hope, ambition or peace, we cannot help but consider our past actions. Huen does exactly that, musing on his current ‘ordinary’ life in the UK but also obliged to remember, fondly and sometimes less so, his formative years in Hong Kong. Who we are is inextricably linked to who, where, how and why we were, and we see that in the constant condensation of Huen’s family members, drifting like ghosts of the past across his huge canvases yet always searching for the light – the path - of the future. Hindsight can offer further clarity to the choices we all must make but this only means that one can never be settled in the present tense: only through trial and error, bouncing between then and now, between is and was, do we fully realise our potential for what is to come.

So it is that Huen’s paths open not when the fog has dissipated but when we all accept that the fog will never leave. We will always live in uncertainty; we will always be bruised by what has come before, but to exist without it means a life condemned to obtuseness and negligent nescience, wrung of challenge, inspiration and integrity. Huen’s ordinary life, so extraordinarily recorded in this ravishing, eloquent, heart-wrenching group of works, reminds us that life is not numbed by the dereliction of failure but rather (to paraphrase Samuel Beckett) by not failing again; by not failing better. By not letting the fog of before guide the path to our future that our present so desperately needs.

Matt Carey-Williams
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
29-30 July, 2025