No. 055
Lee Huanyu
The Delivery of Propitious Signs
60x60cm
Acrylic on canvas
2025
SOLD
The central subject of the painting is a semi-anatomical, translucent horse wearing traditional Chinese cloth shoes. It carries a fiercely burning "horse-hoof gold" (gold ingot) while galloping amidst a flaming sunset and iridescent clouds as thick as stone. The artist seeks to reconcile primal wildness with a sense of religious divinity within the environment, allowing a redemptive warmth and longing to seep through a heavy, near-apocalyptic atmosphere.
The brushwork leans toward a loose, muscular quality, achieving an organic fusion between the subject and its surroundings. The horse is conceived as a transcendental body from a realm beyond the secular world—one that is neither born nor dying, and thus deathless. This incarnation of primal wildness, clad in the old cloth shoes of a traditional laborer, staggers as it heralds its arrival. The act of "bringing auspiciousness" is depicted here as a weighted progression; within the contradictory structure of divinity and savagery, destruction and tenderness, it reveals the eternal tension between cultural trauma and the attempt at healing and fulfillment inherent in "auspicious" narratives.
About the Artist
Lee Huanyu
（China，b.1986)
BFA in Oil Painting, Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts. Based in Xi’an. His artistic practice is rooted in a critical reflection on the Symbolic Order. People are often constrained by established symbols in daily life, forming unconscious patterns of domination. By breaking the logical frameworks of images and introducing randomness in color, he seeks to transcend these linguistic and conceptual constraints. Within the tension of “control and loss of control,” he explores a visually comprehensible balance. In the work “Neither Harmony nor Disharmony” (“Fei He He Fei Bu He He”) exhibited in this show, inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist painting “Four Auspicious Symbols of Harmony” (“He He Si Rui Tu”), seemingly absurd characters are integrated within chaotic patterns structured into orderly forms, creating an uncanny yet rationalized organic architecture.