Back Palace of the Grand Palace

Huang Rui was born in Beijing. He was sent to a work in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution. Despite this, he was able to study art by himself and founded “Xing Xing” or the Stars Group, a pioneering artist group with Ma Desheng. He is currently based in Osaka, Japan and Beijing. Depicting the Forbidden City with a line of gates and windows as its motif, the artist divided the picture in two in order to explore the two dimensional aspect of painting. In China, where realism was the mainstream style of art even during the 1980s, this piece was considered exceptionally experimental.