Artwork Description

Title: Birds Hunt for Food
Artist: Qiyou Huang (黄启佑)
Date: 2015
Medium: Acrylic
Dimensions: 53 x 25 cm

Artwork Identification:
In Birds Hunt for Food, Qiyou Huang captures a tranquil winter hillside under a pale sky, animated by a graceful flock of birds in mid-flight. The landscape, rendered in soft earthy and icy hues, evokes a sense of stillness and poetic solitude, while the birds introduce a delicate sense of motion and life. The work is a vertical format piece that accentuates the sweeping ascent of the hill and sky, guiding the viewer's gaze from grounded brush through to open atmosphere.

Artistic Style and Influences:
Huang’s technique blends the sensitivity of traditional Chinese ink landscapes with Western atmospheric abstraction. The use of acrylic achieves both density and translucence, enabling subtle textures across the earth and air. This fusion of Eastern aesthetic minimalism and Western Romanticism situates his work in a transcultural dialogue on space, silence, and memory. The birds, drawn with sparing detail, recall classical motifs of nature and freedom.

Historical Context:
Created in 2015, Birds Hunt for Food continues Huang's exploration of temporality and solitude within ambiguous landscapes. His paintings often evoke the remnants of both real and imagined places—unpopulated yet suggestive of a human past. In this work, the cold, barren slope and the gentle flock in search of sustenance resonate with broader themes of endurance and instinct within a vanishing world.

Provenance:
Provenance documentation can be provided upon contact.

Condition and Conservation:
Artwork in very good condition. The surface, pigments, and support show no signs of wear or intervention.

Artistic Significance:
Birds Hunt for Food is emblematic of Huang's poetic visual language, in which desolation becomes a space for reflection and subtle vitality. It is a compact yet resonant piece that speaks to the impermanence of seasons, the fragility of nature, and the timeless movement of life across landscapes of memory and change.