I first encountered Huang Zhiyang's work at "Inside Out", the 1998 exhibition organized by Gao Minglu at the Asia Society in New York. Over five meters in height, his monumental serial painting Zoon hung in the exhibition space, stunning viewers with monochrome imagery at once anthropomorphic and zoomorphic. In it Huang very conscientiously renders on paper hyperbolically deformed shapes and tense, pulsating musculature. The striking contrasts between black and white have the immediacy of a print and quickly distance Zoon from traditional ink painting. More than expressive medium or mode, however, Huang Zhiyang is concerned with the theme.

　　Namely, the investigation into the origins of life. The body, sex, the genesis of an organism - these are all directly and explicitly presented to the viewer. At the time, many Taiwan artists confronted dramatic transformations in politics and society and tended to incorporate into their works the pressing issues of their immediate circumstances. By contrast, Huang Zhiyang used images of the human body as metaphors and cut straight to the ground underlying social phenomena: the basic value of humanity and life. Moreover, he has pursued this theme to this day, distinguishing his works from the rest of contemporary ink art as well.

　　Huang Zhiyang's multifaceted practice involves mixed-media painting, sculpture, and installation, but ink painting is his earliest and most frequently-employed medium. In earlier works such as Morphological Ecology (1988), Maternity Room (1991-1992), Phallic Worshippers (1992), When Flowers Are Not Flowers (1992), Man and Woman (1992), Zoon, and Lover's Library (1999), his images are generally composed of leaf-like patterns meticulously rendered in ink. These orderly patterns seem to be Huang's code for life, and are refined into the three-stroke symbol of (ling, or spirit) in his painting installation series Three Marks from 2003-2004. Abandoning figurative imagery for an abstract symbol, Huang presents the genesis of life in an inorganic serial array. Such tension between organic life and inorganic serial presentation is also operative in his installations Moss (2001) and Cave from 1999-2000.

　　After moving to Beijing in 2006, Huang Zhiyang has not been distracted by its urban life or bustling art scene, and instead has been absorbed in his art practice. He says that he rarely ventures outside his studio, which is on the outskirts of the city, and that

　　only on the countryside can he focus on what he truly cares about. Indeed, in the works from his Beijing years, we witness the progress in Huang Zhiyang's investigations of the origins of life. In Zoon - Beijing-Bio from 2006-2007, he expands his subject matter to organic life in a broader sense, including not only humans, plants, and animals but also microbes and other lifeforms. Although this work retains the scale and medium of the earlier Zoon, human and animal figures have been replaced with "abstract" organic imagery, and the regular leaf patterns of the early work have become more flamboyant and expansive vine-like lines. These vivacious images are correspondingly painted in a freer, less labored manner. Anyone with gardening experience knows how quickly vines grow, regardless of season and weather. Even when cut to the root, they soon reemerge. This awesome vitality is evident in Huang's unbroken, intertwined, assertive lines, as is a certain sense of anxiety and disturbance. This is perhaps Huang's unconscious expression of his experience of his environment.

　　T h i st e n d e n c y b e c o m e s s t r o n g e r inthe series ZoonDream scape from 2008 and on wards , in which Huang experiments with his expressive manner by incorporating color. The imagery in Zoon - Dreamscape suggests an unfamiliar world observed under a microscope in a laboratory, as if bringing the viewer one step closer to the origins of life. Huang's interest in miniature worlds reminds me of another painter, Liu Dan, who likewise conducts microscopic examinations of rocks and flowers in ink. In contrast to Liu's rational analyses, however, Huang Zhiyang's efforts seem more concerned with the chaotic vitality of microscopic worlds. The figurative imagery of his earlier works has all but disappeared. The ink lines fluttering amidst layers of colors channel the unknown origins of life in a vague and barely perceptible manner. For several years Huang has isolated himself from the noise of contemporary society and devoted himself to pursuit of the origins of life, but in this series he appears to reach a barrier - a barrier perhaps social, cultural, or psychological. Doubt is palpable in Zoon - Dreamscape, which asks, "Can the origins of life be investigated and be known?" But I believe that such doubt will be precisely what drives Huang Zhiyang's art to the next stage, to which we should all look forward.

　　Huang Zhiyang's works are indisputably unique in their use of the ink painting medium. Their contemporaneity lies in their evocation of things and phenomena of the present and "provides for a continued engagement, in the context of the visible, with that which is contingently excluded from possibility of being seen and represented."