Curriculum Vitae



Hai Huang Brief Biography


Born in 1958 in the city of Suzhou, China. He demonstrated his enthusiasm for drawing at an early age, but this was overlooked as no one in his family was artistically inclined.

Any possibilities of nurturing his interest in drawing were suddenly wiped out when his family were exiled to a remote countryside village in 1969 by the totalitarian government at the beginning of a tumultuous political era in China, i.e. the Cultural Revolution. In the village, his family was living at subsistence level and only by overcoming tremendous economic constraints, as well as political discriminations, did his parents manage to support the completion of his basic secondary school education in 1975. He then laboured in the unproductive fields to earn his living, as no opportunities for further education or personal development were available to him as a member of a ‘politically-incorrect’ family.

In 1978 a drastic change of the political climate occurred in China and many doctrines of the Cultural Revolution were reversed. Part of this change was the restoration of a national examination system for university and college entries. After having passed the national exam but with a limited number of choices available to him at that time, he went to a specialist ceramics college to study mechanical engineering for mass ceramics production, not because he liked the subject but as a desperate measure to leave the countryside for a better future. When he arrived at the college, however, he realised that the ceramics design and painting department had failed to recruit enough students that year and the college was looking for students from other departments within the college to make up the shortfall. He attended an interview and was subsequently transferred from the mechanical engineering department to the design and painting department where his basic training of painting started, very much by chance, at the age of 20.

Although the Cultural Revolution had been officially denounced by the government in the early 1980s, its control of the mass population was nevertheless as rigid as ever. All the university and college graduates at that time had to work for whatever organisations the government decided to send them to and once there they were de facto owned by the organisation. On graduation from the college in 1981, he was dispatched to a watch-making factory in his native city Suzhou, where his work was unrelated to his college training.

After three unhappy years at that factory, he managed to ‘escape’ and taught art at a secondary school. After another four years, he persuaded the school to release him temporarily, to enable him to pursue a two-year programme in Fine Art at the Jiangsu University.

On his return to Suzhou in 1990 from the Jiangsu University, he won over the school to release him permanently and became a lecturer at the Suzhou School of Fine Art where he could devote himself completely to painting. He remains at the School presently.

The two-year stay at the Jiangsu University proved to be a turning point in his career. In 1996, he won the Bronze Medal in the China National Watercolours Exhibition.

He lives in Suzhou with his wife and a daughter. Since the summers of 1999 he has made annual visits to Glasgow where his younger brother, Shan Huang, has been living since 1988.

In April/May 2002, his first solo exhibition was held at the Collins Gallery, University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow.


Awards

1997 Silver medal, Watercolours Exhibition of Jiangsu Province, China
1996 Bronze medal, National Watercolours Exhibition, China


Solo Exhibitions

2002 Tales from Two Cities, Collins Gallery, University of Strathclyde


Selected Group Exhibitions

1996 National Watercolours Exhibition, China
1995 Showcase Exhibition of Mainland Watercolourists, San Francisco,
1994 China Arts Fair, Guangzhou, China
1992 Chinese Watercolours Exhibition, Hong Kong
1992 Showcase Exhibition of Mainland Watercolourists, Taipei, Taiwan
1992 West-Lake Art Exhibition, Hangzhou, China


Publications

1998 Collection of Watercolours, published by Liao-Ning Arts Publishing Company, China
1997 Collection of Watercolours, published by Jiyoute Company, Taiwan