“ only things that have been painted are what I see in reality, Painting and

drawing are eyes ,life, beliefs, and the combination of my subjective and objective

worlds”

Huang Yimin, originally named Chen MiMi was born in Shanghai, China in 1950.

At the age of three, he moved with his parents from Nanjing to Beijing and

immigrated to the United States in 1997. He currently works and lives in New York

and Beijing.

At the age of ten, she was selected to become a student in the painting group of

Beijing Youth Palace. Here, she spent nearly ten years of wonderful time with

teachers and childhood friends who graduated from China's highest university and

had excellent humanistic cultivation. Their classroom was located in the “Shou

huang “Palace in the imperial backyard “Jing Shan" across from the “Forbidden

City” In the first ten years of studying art, she sniffed the scent of the Ming Dynasty

historical site “ Shou Huang Hall" and gradually formed a unique visual memory.

In August 1966, the incredible Cultural Revolution broke out in China, with a

mission to negate all knowledge and traditional culture. Huang Yimin, like all young

people in China, was deprived of the opportunity to continue learning at the age of

sixteen and turned to become a farmer During this period, she devoted herself to

art with great enthusiasm. She painted the streets, people, shops, restaurants, bus

stations, parks, and other historical sites in Beijing, which was her favorite subject

matter. This self-learning experience even surpassed her professional training

during university because she grew up learning art by smelling the atmosphere of

the "Palace of Longevity". Beijing, a city with a strong traditional atmosphere, was

the site where she grew up and taught Huang Yimin a unique artistic language. She

used this language to express her feelings of living next to the Forbidden City. The

world can see what Beijing and the Forbidden City look like in Huang Yi min's eyes

through her "Free Forbidden City" series, which is another reality that can only be

presented through art. It's surreal as well.

It is interesting that her works can also be divided into two parts, reality and

surrealism. In the reality part, she uses her sincere love for Beijing and an almost

abstract yet impressionistic lyrical style to create one landscape after another,

focusing on recording the current mood, which makes her landscape paintings

unique This batch of paintings from 1970 to 1990 has strong characteristics of the

times, faithfully and romantically recording the customs and traditions of China in

the 1970s and 1980s. The painter used his own perspective and eyes to show the

world another face of China, and even most of the cities and streets she painted

have been demolished and rebuilt. However, she unintentionally faithfully recorded

historical moments. This is not a one-time photography, but a painter holding an oilpainting box and riding a bicycle on site, painting once and once .It has physical

memories, and historical moments are frozen in it, with emotions, air, sound,

atmosphere, and difficult to replicate

Huang Yi min developed the "Free Forbidden City" series of large-scale group

paintings in the 1990s. Over the past two decades, she has used different methods,

scales, and materials to expand and deepen this observation method, gradually

maturing the theory of abstract language intervention in the context of reality.

Circles, triangles, squares, rectangles, trapezoids, points, lines, surfaces... The

proportion and density relationship in the picture determine the subtle changes in

emotions. She attempts to surpass the rough feelings of humans during the trial

period, such as happiness, sadness, disappointment, and expectations, and seeks

more refined language that transcends these feelings, elevating human feelings to a

new level. The "Forbidden City of Freedom" series gives people a strong impact,

warm yet sad, gentle yet cruel, calm yet noisy, historical yet realistic, dreamlike,

where people, animals, and totems intertwine and meet

With the changing times and the changing psychology of Huang Yi min, her way of

observation and thinking is also changing. The "Forbidden City of Freedom" series is

still developing and seeking its position in history.