Issue 7, Profiles

Chris Huen Sin-Kan

Painting the kaleidoscopic worlds of his family

Words CHRISTOPHER CHOW

Photography JACOB LILLIS

On most mornings, Chris Huen Sin-Kan begins his day by walking his two children, Joel and Tess, to school with his wife, Haze, before settling into his studio in the afternoon. Joel is currently in the first grade, and Tess in kindergarten, both newly enrolled school students in London, where the family has recently relocated from Hong Kong. Once in his studio, Huen works on various paintings scattered along the walls, each a life-sized scene rendered from memory of his family and their three adopted dogs, Muimui, Balltsz, and Doodood. Some days, Huen might return to define more shadows in an unfinished painting depicting Tess and Muimui set therein. Other days, he might begin a new painting of them from a new memory. By late afternoon, Huen finishes at his studio and walks his dogs in the neighborhood park with his wife, and the household ends their night together with dinner and bedtime.

When Huen recounts glimpses of the daily routines that structure both his present life and his paintings, he often returns to the idea of ordinariness. In conversation, he ponders aloud about the relationship between his life and art, often shifting his eyes side to side when in thought and smiling softly once he arrives at a conclusion. Much like the layers of remembered imagery in his paintings, he unveils his creative philosophy in fragments. It begins with the basic principles of communication, Huen concedes: “It is this fundamental or, some might say, primitive level of communicating with other people which I have always been eager to achieve.” Fast-forwarding through the evolution of his practice, he later continues, “The more that I worked, the more I wanted to communicate the ordinariness of life.”

Now living in London since 2021, Huen reflects back on how his upbringing and education in Hong Kong shaped his career today. The fictional worlds of cartoons in television and media growing up offered creative fodder for his childhood imagination, inspiring him to construct universes of his own in pen and paper. He had always known he wanted to be an artist, but he wondered from a young age what he could dedicate to a life-long project. Studying at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Huen was intrigued by the psychological intensity of post-war Western figuration, through the paintings of Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, and the subversive rise of contemporary conceptual art in the installations of Maurizio Cattelan. His life in Hong Kong at the turn of the twenty-first century, however, seemed to provide neither the context of turmoil for expressionist painting nor the critical discourse for concept-based practice. Instead, surrounded by the bustling urban density of Hong Kong, Huen turned inwards to embrace the obverse pleasures of slowness and softness. In his drawings, and eventually, his paintings, Huen arrived at not only an aesthetic that expressed such sensibilities, but also a recurring motif in the ordinariness of his everyday life. Put simply, Huen recalls, “For me, what I realized that I wanted to depict was the experience of seeing…” he pauses. “Seeing things.”

Huen is an observer of the subtle but critical distinctions between merely “seeing” and “seeing things.” Where the act of seeing something cannot be isolated from the object of sight, seeing encompasses the overall abstract phenomenon of that which proceeds from our eye to the thing. “We don’t see everything, really only what we pay attention to. We don’t ignore background information, we filter it,” Huen meditates on the nature of seeing. “And when we try to narrate experiences to other people, we pick up certain things.” In his work, Huen recreates the details that he distinctly notices and remembers, information that provides a guiding mirror into the larger scope of how he sees and, in turn, how he experiences or interprets the world.

While Huen’s genre paintings of his family illustrate scenes of the ordinary, their pastel worlds are enchanted with a magical romance that reveals visions and experiences which are anything but. Lush displays of flora and foliage abound in the settings of Huen’s paintings, sprawling into rooms where children sleep and dogs roam, or surrounding his wife, Haze, in outdoor natural vistas. Interspersed, household objects fade in and out of focus, adorning bookshelves and gardens that ease into background environments like white noise. Though each a palimpsestic realm of their own, Huen’s paintings find unified grounding in the quotidian simplicity of their titles: Balltsz, Muimui, and Doodood; Doodood, Haze, Muimui and Balltsz; Joel and Haze are separate paintings of Huen’s, each respectively named after the titular characters depicted in their unique mise en scènes. In MuiMui and Haze (2018), which debuted at Huen’s first solo exhibition at Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo in 2019, Haze lounges on a chair and clutches a pillow, her calm expression illuminated by the faint glow of warm lamplight above. Beside her, Muimui sits perched and alert. The television is left blank, silent; a gentle stillness echoes throughout the domestic evening ambience instead.