Matt Huynh: Alluvia

Overview

I recently went to the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Which, contextually, is neither here nor there except that it houses the world's largest collection of ancient Chinese art, stretches for floor upon floor of exhibits and is utterly mind blowing. There were so many incredible artifacts to see that I stopped taking things in after the first floor (which didn't even make it to the last thousand years) and wandered around, wires crossed, in an overwhelmed, blanked-out daze; occasionally stopping in front of one exhibit for longer than another when something in it particularly grabbed me. There's a description of the bust of a horse in my notes — eyes wide, tongue sticking out, 200 BC — which is probably a good example of what I'm going to get at here. It was over two thousand years old, but like so much of the museum's collection it was still so alive; with such finely captured, nimble movement.

That's kind of the appeal of comic artist Matt Huynh's work, which you can see some of at The Paper Mill. An exhibition of stand-alone illustrations, Alluvia showcases the self-taught artist's colourful, detailed and dynamic brushwork over twenty thematically varied but uniformly agile pieces. Like the ye olde ceramic horse head, these aren't necessarily wonders of anatomical correctness — some of the proportions tend towards the marginally wonky — but it's a hard task to name a local artist who's work is as distinctively spry.

Huyhn largely works as a comic book artist and oft-times collaborative illustrator rather than primarily creating standalone pieces. You may have read his CAB anthology or heard of his upcoming Chinatown Comics project, both of which detail other people's stories of living in particular Sydney neighbourhoods. To be fair, this does show, and some of the illustrations in Alluvia struggle to carry an emotional weight of their own bereft of a story or someone else's voice. Though it's clear that you're supposed to get something out of these drawings, themes of mortality, contemplation and the like can come across as studious rather than visceral. But given that the sensibilities of indie comic artists often run a narrow and arguably lazy gamut from misanthropy to depression, this is potentially more a case of ambitions being slightly out of reach than something to genuinely beef, and it shouldn't stop anyone from wanting to check this show (and relatively new venue) out.