Foreword
“Where bamboo thickens and insects hum, the fleeting chill comes not from breeze.” This verse by Song Dynasty poet Yang Wanli does more than capture a summer night’s refreshing coolness. It reveals a subtler presence. Unbound to moving air yet felt upon the skin, it stirs the soul. Such sensations born of the invisible permeate Kang Haitao’s paintings. His nightscapes reject theatrical description, shunning stark light-shadow contrasts. Instead, through layered indigo blues, deep greens, and ash grays, they breathe an unnamed temperature. Like Yang’s “fleeting chill,” this temperature carries the very texture of time. It emerges when clamor fades but sleep hasn’t yet come: city lights linger as sounds hush, consciousness hovering between wakefulness and darkness. Kang’s work crystallizes this “in-between realm”. Here, day-night shifts aren’t marked by light but by perceptual turns—a pause in mood, an inexplicable coolness. The artist recalls his preference for nocturnal walks since adolescence. Initially drawn to night’s simplicity, with its serene mystery and light-shadow dances, the artist had an impulse to depict the scene. Yet as his process deepened, he gradually realized that prolonged contemplation and fleeting glances created no essential difference in a landscape’s visual presentation. Rational analysis receded and intuition took command. For him, intuition holds greater complexity, inclusivity, and transformative power. Thus he abandoned predetermined meanings, pursuing “pure” presence in painting. Trees embody nature’s quietude and simplicity, houses symbolize humble truths, while light power ignites the canvas’s soul. Layered brushstrokes build ethereal visions, weaving an ambiance both rooted in reality and transcending it. Meaning coalesces only after completion, which is forever open and fluid, forever dialoguing between artist and viewer.
This stance imbues Kang Haitao’s paintings with a near “self-effacing” presence. He emphasizes that art emerges not from rational dissection but from direct sensory immersion. Painting becomes his vessel for exploring human-world connections, himself merely the recorder. As he professes, painting holds two truths: visible expression (object and observation) and invisible expression (mind and sensation). These dual realities intertwine in his work, not as opposing forces but symbiotic echoes. Trees, streetlamps, houses shed their representational nature through layered strokes, revealing instead a spiritual atmosphere. This essence is neither raw emotion nor calculated order, but intuition-forged architecture. Kang likens painting to “building a house”: each stroke a brick laid upon the last, accumulating into a monumental being. Here, emotion dissolves into resonant rhythm, which is calm yet persistent. He treasures the marriage of rhythm and material. Slow painting crafts monumental and emotionless images while swift strokes capture spontaneous pulse. This temporal sensitivity transforms images into lived experiences of time. In his “Nightscape” series, time suspends—pooling, deepening, expanding. Layered pigments stack like stonework, compressing epochs until crystallized as spiritual geology. Light’s arrival breathes against stagnation. It’s like breathing soul into congealed visions. Thus, in Kang’s world, time is frozen current, not linear flow but “liquid stillness”.
This temporal experience is precisely why the “fleeting chill” captivates. It is neither pure rational analysis nor emotional outpouring, but a delicate interstice between. Like night air that is invisible yet intimately touching skin, it invites viewers before the canvas into a suspended breath, bodily stillness, and unspeakable serenity. Such tranquility holds no passive emptiness, but quietude with latent power, subtly reshaping our perceptual rhythms. Kang Haitao insists that meaning is not the origin of painting but its afterglow. Thus, his works reject symbolic decoding or narrative messaging, honoring instead perception’s raw immediacy. Trees, houses, light spots, as “simple beings,” bear no explicit symbolism on canvas. They exist purely to be witnessed. Meaning remains perpetually open: tethered to the artist’s psyche yet alive in each viewer’s encounter. Before these works, one can generate their own visceral encounter, feeling a shiver of coolness, breath catching, or wordless solitude. Here, art ceases to be the endpoint of information, becoming the threshold of perception. Kang doesn’t recount “stories about night”; he invents an “experience of night” uniquely his own. In our urban age, this nocturnal experience is rare. Fast-paced lives reduce night to day’s annex, a slot for rest, consumption, and entertainment. Yet in Kang’s vision, night is a self-sufficient existence, defined not by day nor by its opposite, but as an autonomous realm. Night is no void of darkness, but a space filled with breath. Indigo blues and deep greens lend it thickness and ash-white light spots guard against submersion. Thus, his night transcends romanticized projections or fearful symbols, emerging as a restorative force. Within this self-contained nocturnal space, viewers recalibrate body and senses. Time ebbs gently while existence’s weight intensifies. Such methodology harbors profound philosophy. Kang champions intuition’s primacy, viewing consciousness merely as experience’s tool, never feeling’s substitute. This aligns with phenomenology: Edmund Husserl’s “back to the things themselves” and Merleau-Ponty’s “body as the foundation of perception.” Kang’s paintings spring from embodied intuition, with each stroke a corporeal energy released and intuition’s instantaneous record. Here painting isn’t reproduction but presence, not meaning’s explanation but experience’s genesis. Further still, this approach echoes the “self-effacement” in Eastern philosophy. Painting becomes the ego’s dissolution. Only as self-awareness fades can the artist approach the naked truth of existence.
Thus, “A Fleeting Chill, Not of the Wind” is not only the title of Kang Haitao’s solo exhibition, but an invitation to see differently. It reminds us that significance lies not in clamorous spectacles, but in overlooked subtleties: temperature shifts, humidity’s whisper, light’s undertow. These seemingly minor elements quietly transform our relationship with the world. Kang’s paintings become vessels for this transformation. Through slow, deliberate brushstrokes, viewers enter an autonomous “experience of night”. Here, colors layer like sedimentary time, light points flicker like dormant stars, moments compress yet expand. In the air floats an inexplicable yet palpable coolness, drawn from the depth of time, perception, and existence. His works offer us a slender, silent path. Here we pause, breathe, feel, unknowingly weaving new bonds with the world. This path makes no grand claims, yet channels art’s most essential power: not to explain existence, but to teach us how to rediscover presence in the fleeting chill.
Lin Shuchuan
August 22, 2025
A conversation with the night
Opening Dialogue of the Exhibition
"The chill at times comes not from the wind"
14:30 - 16:30 September 7, 2025
