Light Jelly Sweet & Other Moving Images

Light Jelly Sweet & Other Moving Images, an exhibition of new work by Henry Hu. Featuring animation, paintings, and photographs—together the selection spotlights the artist’s continued interest in abstraction as a force that might signify life without directly defining it. Engaged with notions of mysticism, central to his practice is an enquiry into the spiritual end.

Light Jelly Sweet (2022-23)—the centrepiece of the presentation—is realised through a large suite of mixed-media paintings and photo-based works. Forgoing an explicit narrative structure, the artist furthers his exploration into the language and material process of abstract painting, investigating the physicality of the medium. What arises from Light Jelly Sweet, whether on canvas, board, or paper, are testaments of existence as imagined, invented, remembered, and observed.

The initial impression is one of self-generative creation, with vignettes of growth and decay symbolising biological life cycles. The buried fears, the old grudges, the wounded feelings are fused together in these artworks that reach for an understanding of vulnerability, turning inward and examining the subconscious landscape. It is the concept of perception—the perception of a past or a memory, and how we frown upon it—that is at the forefront of what unifies this series.

Henry Hu’s approach is both spontaneous and exact. Limiting his range of tonal palette within each work, the paintings combine a multi-layered technique of paint pours with an ecosystem of raw, earthly materials—mixing sand, gravel, twig, leaf, grass, and wood. The process is fluid, but ever precise and assertive. Each element tunnels into, intertwines with the other, constructing an architecture of forms, colours and texture. A delicate manipulation of material that traces the ambiguity of nostalgia. The end result materialises as an account of time, consciousness made visible. At heart, the works are an embodiment of the natural world, to preserve what is fleeting, a piece of reflection, a quiet wonder.

Also on view are computer-generated animation. Conceived as an extension and companion to the static work, these motion images are a synesthetic field of shapes and rhythms, to suggest the ethereal or perhaps the transcendental—pixelated, fuzzy, blurred visuals that also make parallels with the digital world, advancing the artist’s constant search into new territories of abstraction. Seemingly dissimilar, the common thread that links the video imagery is an intimate study on the mechanism and limitations of memory, both personal and collective, interpreting the lost time, space and thought.