Huang Qihou is a man —— frank and ingenuous. Though man in his fifties, he remains to have all the heady zest of a young boy indulging himself in arms, wars, military assaults and killings. Just like a kid’s dreamland appearing in the state of hot being wide awake, or the hallucinations during a high fever, the consecutive paintings of his has become rhapsodies of the world war, composed groups of wide-ranging historical scenes, and numerous fictional violent details, and all kinds of troops, battles, events, battlefields, so that all these theaters of war in all times and in all pasts of the world stud nearly every canvas, no difference could be discerned between enemy forces and ours, victories and defeats ancient and modern, at home and abroad……
　　His climax of delight lands on the canvases is in the beheading, not out of his bloodthirstiness, but the purest goodness of a little boy. His painting ‘the beheading of the heroes in Wu Xu Political Reform at Cai Shi Kou’ is out of his deep sorrow in history, as if he has no choice but to see a string of gory heads he painted with his own eyes so as to stimulate unretrievable grief. But some other beheading scenes can obviously make him cheerful. In a certain extremely complicated scene on which the artist adopted a childish theme entitled A .38 and Machete, delightedly, the moment he is painting when several Japs are beheaded at one stroke by our army man. What a vent to our anger and hatred! It looks as easy as cutting onions! And the Japs bayonets always beat the air, that shows the Chinese Trojans were so accurate, and meanwhile, seemed to be so funny, they make themselves wry-necked to dodge the whizzing blades. It is just brilliant!
　　This is not a description of the intrepidly killing the enemy. The truth is, more than half a century after the war, this Chinese old boy is still bearing a grudge, so he keeps taking vengeance on the Japs through his canvases. On the cover of his portfolio stands a gigantic roaring Chinese warrior with a head of a Japs in his left hand and a saber in his right hand. The saber pierces through the photo which shows the miserable scene of the Japs who are killing the Chinese common people. —— the accordance of this image itself is just that Huang Qihou conquered this it with his paintbrush: in this painting, the bleeding head represents the Japs, and the slaughterer is Huang himself. And this torn photo successfully avenges our humiliating disgrace in history because killing this photo is a far better way than beheading the Japs in terms of venting our deep hatred. The self-portrait sketch (the artist Huang Qihou) painted to fix this image is more attractive than his original one in the form of oils. For the sake of portraying the fury of reprisals, He had to keep his mouth wide open and tried his best to distend every blood vessel on his face, and then stroke by stroke portrayed his fury in the mirror. It’s just like a boy who had been bullied by a stronger one and simulated his revengeful state of mind, letting off curses after he got back home.
Behind this are the retributory images fictionalised warrior, Huang Qihou painted a thickly dotted panorama of the Nanjing Massacre.
　　Like a pupil in his third grade, (the artist Huang Qihou) collects all the pictures available. He not only transferred these pictures into his own works, but put them into his protfolio as well, so that the readers can freely stroll in various views with him. The writer has never seen such an involute makeup that viewers can hardly distinguish his own paintings from the presswork he collected——but the penner will not persuade him to do the makeup over again because that was the very precious illusions of his own. Of course, most pictures are from the American or Soviet pictorials of that time, the Cold War Time. The Two Poles of the world and the provocations of those extraordinarily wild imaginations were all due to the taboos and shortages of fantasy in the Red China, and all these imagination brought this old boy into the picture forest of national affairs and the general international situation. Huang Qihou immersed himself in this joyful bewilderment and obtained indulgence and redemption through his paintings. He is in the vortex of historical pictures, going up and down and forcing himself to appear at the historical scenes and moments, which were impossible for him to have experienced—— the English battlefield, Normandy Invasion, the Stalingrad Battle, warring the Middle and Far East, the Pacific Campaign, the Chinese war zone in the Loess Plateau. Look! This urchin is even intruding on the battleship that belongs to the top generals of the Allied Forces. He is also sitting without scruple at the tail of combat plane which was piloted by the famous German, “knight in air” Richthofen. What is this guy at? He is sketching. What does he see? Chiang Kai-shek on the E’mei Mountain is staring at Mao Ze Dong at foot of the Bao Ta Mountain in Yan’an. Both Hitler and Mussolini appear in the Surrender Ceremony of Japan on the Missouri Warship. Jiang Qing and Zhang Cunqiao stands by the window of a certain building in Shanghai where the armed fights are taking place…… Are these scenes the mirage of the painter? These are historical probabilities which might be laid aside, as time goes by and are now being re-acknowledged through Huang’s paintings.
　　When he is busy making travels in the world war, it sometimes occurs to him that he himself is a painter. In a large-scale very complacent self-portrait, he tries inviting some well-known historic characters to be with him in the painting to join him, for instance, Rembrandt is standing beside him, painting with him, and the cut-off ear Van Gogh is sitting silently in the corner. Huang Qihou is wearing traditional fabric clothes studio to pay his respects to the masters, yet the theme of this painting still seems to be of “beheading”: With great gusto, Huang himself is painting execution spectacle in the mediaeval Europe. On the chair lies the photo of the decapitation competition of the Japs Army, which the painter bears in mind constantly. Meanwhile, the sketch beside Rembrandt shows that the master once did portray decapitation as well.(Matt 14:10-11) Like a response, or, more like an antithesis in poetic lines, on the xylograph from Ming Dynasty there is a brigand holding a chopped-off head which echoes that painting a little below. Is it the mirage of the painter? Definitely not! It is the probability of humanity: In all historical, in the East or in the West times, some people are beheading, some people are painting. Huang Qihou rooted the beheading scenes in his paintings and grafted them into history.
　　If he were born in Florence in the 14th Century or in Dunhuang in the era of North Wei Dynasty (386-534A.D.), he would definitely be an ambitious frescoer. But in our Image Age, there are no appropriate walls wanting him to paint upon, so he pours all kinds of images into his canvas and keeps them reproducing. His inspirations are as comprehensive and miscellaneous as the contents of his paintings: Basch, Brueghel,  Tintoretto, Goya, Chinese frescos in temples, comic ghost pictures from Ming and Qing Dynasties, comic strips in the early years of ROC, propagandist posters in the early years of PRC, caricatures during the Cultural Revolution…. Along with his allied and apocalyptic friend Liu Dahong, who is 10 years junior to him, disregarded the current fashion or rather the general trend. They look down up on the so-called theory, refuse to be categorized as any school, and work out all sorts of stories on their canvas as if they were under the influence of being freaked out and experienced hallucination. Both of them are anxious to be the active spokesmen of the stark realities of the day. And their piquant image rules derive from their serious historical responsibility. Among the contemporary, vain glorious arts, there is hardly another self-same painter who cherishes an unswerving emotion towards Chinese revolutions——from the end of Qing Dynasty to the beginning of ROC and to the Cultural Revolution——and especially the aftermath of these revolutions. Only these two ‘fools’ did so. In these widely sportive descriptions of the miseries, over the past century, magnificence, and absurdity become the painters’ feast. The difference is, Liu Dahong’s paintings are satires on political harangues, full of teases and provocations, expressing his righteousness in an a sinister way. Huang Qihou’s mirage is to make the mainstream drama and tragedy in history transform into a nightmarish comedy, or, a comedic nightmare, which wanders in his own churning dreamland.
　　This is the real of Chinese style art in which is drenched with the painter’s native experience, especially the historical imagination about China. Even if he painted a great amount of western views, yet they are still dominated by the adament Chinese consciousness. It’s just like looking on a death penalty, although it is too pathetic on watching; nonetheless, the onlookers still have a strong desire to make a closer observation on it. These paintings appeal to our attention with a rather bluff and ingenuous appearace. Some details which are seriously adapted and the details willfully exaggerated are actually even truer and more humanistic than the real history: they are not going to present the history with which we are already so familiar. They intend to tell us, what kind of imagination did history leave us. This kind of historical imagination comes into history automatically, without recourse to any schoolbooks. And in fact, the history in our imagination is the consequences of history, no matter it leads to right or wrong.
　　The artist’s portfolio entitled “The History in my Heart”. He in the frame of an ecstatic, portrayed the furious history that left behind. Only in this way, can he successfully chop off the heads of the enemy with his paintbrush and return alone to the sky of history, soaring in the haze. Just at this moment, the fury accumulated in his heart——also, the fury of the whole nation——turns into ecstasy.
　　4th March, 2008 in New York
 

作者：陈丹青