Striking Distance

MENG HUANg

08. September - 05. November 2022

It is the empty space surrounding a mountain's summit that accentuates its grandeur. Similarly, the sky above a field, the distance the human eye can suppose, emphasizes its vastness. Gazing into these distances suggests a visual-mental journey from the viewer's position to somewhere else. The distance has no direction and no destination; the only clear variable is the point we are moving away from.

Meng Huang's paintings have landscapes as their subject as much as the empty spaces above and around them. The formal and thematic immanence of distance in the artist’s works can be retraced in his biography. Despite Meng Huang's move to Berlin 10 years ago, the artist's thoughts and concerns remained with China. Already here and not yet arrived - that is one of the starting points of this exhibition, as well as the emotional and mental processes that follow the experience of cultural displacement and an encounter with distance. Evidently, the idiom "Striking Distance" implies a dual distance that can emerge when leaving a culture behind. Close enough to touch and simultaneously conspicuously distant. However, this year marks an immanent change in Meng Huang's artistic work. For the first time, he is not exclusively painting Chinese landscapes but now also German and Austrian sceneries. Putting these landscape paintings from China, Germany and Austria into a dialogue captures a turning point. This incision perhaps suggests hope and the possibility of overcoming the emotional and cultural distance between oneself and a new environment. Learning to navigate the distance and find solitude, not in proximity to culture but to beliefs, permits new clarity to spread across the void and offers an unparalleled perspective on the world.

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