Physically confined to his home in suburban Beijing in the later stages of his life, Huang was not able to travel as much as he liked. Instead, he turned his shrewd gaze on small things within his reach; the potted flowers in his study, the new plants in his courtyard, and shrimps brought by friends. He examined them at length, lost in thought and then expressed what he felt with ink and color.

Wu Hongliang, director of the Beijing Fine Art Academy, which has held several exhibitions for Huang, says that the artist saw "a miniature universe" in the small lives around him, and celebrated them in his work.

"One feels the various dimensions he used to understand the world, which were not only based on an accumulation of knowledge, observation and experience," Wu says, citing one of the paintings on display depicting a spider and a butterfly trapped in its web, a scene Huang observed one day.

"He drew the scene and related it to how one makes judgments in life. He always worked hard to enrich his knowledge of the world."

The exhibition also zooms in on Huang's mastery of baimiao (plain drawing), a technique he favored when painting in the classical Chinese style.

It relies on the artist's ability to control his brushes and paint smooth, changing lines to finish a drawing, with no other color but ink.

Huang's depiction of Li Shizhen is a fine example of this kind of work. In it, Huang painted dense lines all over the paper to build up an image of the 16th-century medical scholar and author of Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao Gangmu), surrounding him with dozens of plants, insects and other materials of traditional Chinese medicine that he is known to have researched.

"Literature ranks first in my life, before sculpture and woodcuts, and painting comes fourth," Huang once said.

He read and wrote extensively. "My advice to young people is do not waste time, read a lot, let books be your guide."

These preferences are also evident in the paintings on display.