Haotian 郝恬

Rooms, balconies, gardens, and open windows recur throughout Haotian’s work. These spaces are rarely literal records of existing places. Instead, she brings together fragments of architecture, travel, memory, and fantasy to create environments that feel intimately familiar yet impossible to locate. An empty chair, a glowing lamp, a distant sailboat, or a vase of flowers can suggest an unseen inhabitant, transforming the domestic interior into a psychological portrait. In works such as The Warmest Room in Norway, the contrast between an icy landscape and an illuminated room turns shelter into an emotional condition: home is created through warmth, attention, and a sense of protection from the outside world.

Her recent paintings also enter into an imaginative dialogue with modern art history. Haotian constructs rooms and landscapes for artists including David Hockney, Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Cézanne, placing their visual languages within worlds of her own invention. These paintings are neither quotations nor homages in the conventional sense. They operate more like speculative encounters, asking what kind of room an artist might inhabit, what landscape might belong beyond the window, and how the atmosphere of a painting can preserve a way of seeing across generations. In The Card Players, for example, Cézanne's nineteenth-century subject passes through Hockney’s experiments with perspective before arriving on Haotian’s vividly imagined Icelandic veranda.

Color is the architecture of Haotian’s paintings. Saturated pinks, greens, blues, and oranges distinguish warmth from distance, shelter from exposure, and the remembered world from the present one. Rather than functioning as decoration or as part of a fixed symbolic code, color determines how a space is felt. In Hockney's Lakehouse, pink sky and yellow trees intensify the view beyond the balcony, while deep greens hold the interior in shadow and stillness. The eye moves continually between enclosure and openness, comfort and longing.

Haotian draws upon the Chinese literary tradition of Peach Blossom Spring and the Biblical Garden of Eden, while increasingly extending this search for paradise into the history of painting itself. Her works propose imagination as a form of reconstruction: a way of preserving vanished places, inhabiting lives never lived, and holding a fleeting moment still before it disappears.

Haotian is a recipient of the Baolong Art Award.