Chunqing Huang China, b. 1974

Chunqing Huang was born in 1974 in Heze, China, and lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. From 1994 to 1998 she studied free graphics and painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. During this period she also taught painting, drawing, and graphics at the CAFA evening school. In 2000 she relocated to Germany to continue her studies at the Städelschule, the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt am Main, where she studied free painting and interdisciplinary art under Professor Peter Angermann, Professor Hermann Nitsch, and Professor Wolfgang Tillmans, completing a Meisterschüler degree under Hermann Nitsch in 2004. Her graduation work, No Pebbles Here, was exhibited at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, an early marker of the institutional recognition that would follow.

Huang's practice spans painting, photography, film, and installation, with oil painting at its centre. Her work is rooted in a sustained engagement with the history of art and with the act of painting itself as a subject. Her Painter's Portrait series, begun in 2016, consists of small-format oil paintings in which she portrays celebrated painters from art history, from Old Masters to contemporary figures, placing herself in dialogue with a tradition she both honours and interrogates. The series was the subject of a major solo exhibition at Museum Wiesbaden in 2021, accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Wolfgang Ullrich and Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, and was reviewed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Monopol. A second chapter of the series, Painter's Portrait II, was presented at 68projects by KORNFELD in 2022, accompanied by a catalogue published by DCV Berlin with texts by Mark Gisbourne and Dorothea Zwirner. Her practice also draws on autobiographical reference and cross-cultural experience, as in the 2023 exhibition Coming Home at the Steigenberger Icon Frankfurter Hof, in which she connected her own biography with that of Max Beckmann, who used the hotel bar as a retreat in the 1920s.

Huang has received consistent recognition for her work. In 2003 she was awarded first prize at Junge Kunst mit Zukunft at the Zollamt, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, and in 2004 second prize at the same competition at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt. Her work has been included in significant collections including the Sammlung Rausch, presented at the Portikus Frankfurt. Since 2019 she has taught painting and colour theory at the Academy of Visual Arts in Frankfurt am Main, and has led workshops in painting, drawing, and Chinese calligraphy through the City of Frankfurt's You&Eye programme.

Her exhibition history includes presentations at the Städel Museum Frankfurt, the Kunsthalle Mannheim, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt, the Kunstverein Speyer, and the 7th Istanbul Biennale. KORNFELD Galerie Berlin presented Chunqing Huang at 68projects by KORNFELD with the solo exhibition Painter's Portrait II in 2022, and at Art Dubai in 2022, bringing her work to an international audience across two continents in the same year.