fluktor -|||- study - office - newsletter October 22, 2005

AAP, October 22, 2005
Huang Yong Ping in Retrospect
By Lindsay C. Messenger
AAP Intern

[image]
The Walker Art Center proudly debuted the original showing of House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective to the public this Sunday.

The House of Oracles exhibits two decades of Huang’s artistic efforts - as one body of work – in his first-ever retrospective.

From imperialism to consumerism, Huang speaks through contemporary paintings, sculpture, and installations about the break up of empires and the resulting contradictions of modern society. His art provokes the uncertainty of national identity, while his themes venture east to west.

Visitors venture through Huang’s life, his art, or as the artist would say, into “the belly of the beast.”

“You are being digested… and then spit out,” describes Phillip Vergne, Chief Curator and Deputy Director of the Walker.
[images]

The retrospective was first conceived three years ago by Vergne and assistant curator Doryun Chong, who helped Huang catalogue all of his work. From there his menagerie has become a “total work of art,” an environment of unique dioramas and sculptural hybrids. In critiquing Huang’s art one challenges the meaning of contemporary art itself. In every piece of his body, culture is in question.

Vergne recalls being in Paris with Huang and his art as “An overwhelming experience, revealing the extent to which the work was consistent, ambitious, sarcastic and humorous, and sharply subversive.”

Contradictions are often found where they are not seen. At the entry of his gallery are four remnants of British imperialism, each missing something crucial. Lining the passage into the following gallery are two empty lion cages, which hold only the bones and excrement of the missing beast.

Visitors enter into Huang’s belly of work, through two passages marked as airport immigration signs “national” and “other.” This notion of crossing boarders is familiar and a fitting entry – or exit – point. Already, the viewer is asked to question self-identity.

Huang explores the spectrum of current, and past, global politics and societal conflicts. He looks at the demise of colonialism in Hong Kong’s China return, and at ancient Chinese traditions of medicine making. Current impressions of the American Empire and Chinese nationalism are also melded into the works.

From beginning to the end, through digestion and regurgitation, the viewer is torn and contradicted, inundated with waves of Chinese tradition, and globalization. Huang’s gallery is a small universe, or an animal’s body, each work is a subset of metaphors.

A gigantic gourd, a symbol of traditional Chinese medicine, lies near the spine of his work – that is represented by a 50-foot python suspended from the ceiling.

A world map is a tabletop, on which rests an enclosure the shape of a turtle shell, where live snakes, millipedes, scorpions, and spiders crawl together in what he has entitled the “theater of the world.” This piece was inspired by the ancient Chinese tradition, where venomous animals would be put inside a jar for one year, anticipating the most potent animal would emerge.

Some of Huang’s metaphorical subsets depict the end of empires. A statue of a fallen metal road sign with an American eagle atop it symbolizes all countries that have become victims of American violence. It is the archetypical symbol of royal sovereignty. Another piece is a Beaux Arts style bank from 1920s Shanghai, modeled from 40,000 pounds of sand and concrete – which is slowly disintegrating during the exhibition.

“Two Typhoons” symbolizes the lack of communication and misunderstandings of the contemporary world. The piece, two towering Tibetan prayer wheels adorned with script from the Koran, was originally called the twin towers and then changed after 9/11.

The transfer of Hong Kong from Great Britain to China is represented in oversized replicas of ceramic rice-bowls filled with out-dated British products with a July 1st 1997 expiration date, from when the event occurred.

Huang’s most recent work is the Walker-commissioned Bat Project IV, a 40-foot tunnel made from the cockpit of a decommissioned plane, including bamboo scaffolding and plastic construction fences, filled with 300 stuffed bats, Chinese symbols of prosperity. This depicts the coming and going of war coverage in media, and has gone through three re-installments due to government censorship.

Huang is a native of Xiamen, China, and since 1989 he has resided in Paris, France. After the Cultural Revolution he studied oil painting in Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. His artistic 1989 debut was in Magicians de la terre (magicians of the earth) in Pompidou. He is globally renowned, and has work featured in both the Sao Paulo and Shanghai Bienneals, and major museums in Europe, Asia, and the United States. He was a finalist in the 1998 biennial Hugo Boss Prize at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. That same year he was represented in the Walker’s Unfinished History exhibition.

This retrospective is an opportunity for the American audience to piece together and understand the contradictions of modern China, for themselves.

What does Huang hope to leave with his viewers: Their own impression of his work.

“My work has all sorts of interpretations. I cannot subjectively impose that on them. It is up to them,” he laughs. This was told to the Asian American Press in translation, since he speaks French and Mandarin, not English.

http://www.aapress.com/archive/2005/weboct21/a-huangping.htm

*******************************

artdaily.com, 10/19/2005
House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective

[image] Huang Yong Ping, 11 June 2002 - The Nightmare of George V, 2002. concrete, reinforced steel, animal skins, paint, fabric cushion, plastic, wood, and cane seat 96 x 140 x 66 in. Courtesy the artist, Paris.

MINNEAPOLIS, MN.-The Walker Art Center presents House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective. This exhibition presents the first retrospective of the work of this contemporary chinese artist. Working with diverse traditions and media, Huang Yong Ping has created an artistic universe comprised of provocative installations that challenge the viewer to reconsider everything from the idea of art, to national identity, to recent history. Once one of the leading figures of the Xiamen Dada movement--a collective of artists interested in creating a new Chinese cultural identity by bridging trends in Western modernism with Chinese traditions of Zen and Taoism--Huang continues to confront established definitions of history and aesthetics.

Huang's sculptures and installations--drawing on the legacies of Joseph Beuys, Arte Povera, and John Cage as well as traditional chinese art and philosophy--routinely juxtapose traditional objects or iconic images with modern references. Eight-Legged Hat (2000) pairs ancient Egyptian ibis with a pith helmet, reflecting Egypt's colonial past. Other works resonate with more recent events: Bat Project II (2002) is a replica of the wing from the U.S. spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter jet in 2001, setting off a weeklong international standoff. Two Typhoons (2001) consists of the prayer scrolls from a dismantled Tibetan prayer wheel, echoing the continuing conflict between Communist China and Buddhist Tibet.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a major publication, the first to address the full range of Huang Yong Ping's artistic accomplishments. After its premiere at the Walker, the exhibition will be shown at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and venues in Asia and Europe.

http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=15252&b=chinese%20art

****************************

Star Tribune, October 19, 2005
Huang Yong Ping pokes cross-cultural fun
Mary Abbe, Star Tribune

The Walker's new retrospective by Chinese-born Huang Yong Ping carries some heavy intellectual baggage, but don't let allusions to Marcel Duchamp and Michel Foucault distract from the remarkable accessibility of "House of Oracles," a collection of strange objects that packs a huge visual punch.

Rich with historical allusions and cross-cultural references, "Oracles" is a take-the-kids kind of exhibit that can be enjoyed on many levels: as a mordant commentary on the demise of European colonialism, as a critique of Eastern culture and Western art forms, as a poke in the eye to American military might or simply as a big celebration of Neo-Pop Chinese art.

Nobody at the Walker is mentioning the P word, "Pop" being a decidedly uncool art style in high aesthetic circles these days. But there's an undeniably Pop look to much of Huang's sculpture, which, like the work of Claes Oldenburg, alters the scale and materials of ordinary objects for psychological effect. Where Oldenburg enlarged a spoon and cherry into a playful sculpture of monumental size, Huang made Chinese rice bowls bigger than bathtubs and added a droll political spin by filling them with prepackaged food that expired in July 1997, the date when the British ended more than a century of colonial domination by returning Hong Kong to the Chinese. Other Pop moments include a closet-sized gourd full of dried roots, snakeskins and other ancient tonics (the gourd being a traditional container for Chinese medicine), and a 40,000-pound sand-and-concrete model of a Beaux-Arts style Shanghai bank whose decay over the next few months will serve as a reminder of the waning import of Western concepts in Asia.

For Americans, Huang is unusual because his perspective remains distinctively Chinese and highly critical of the West despite his having lived in Paris since 1989. The show spans 20 years, from muddy abstractions he made using the I Ching, roulette-style games of chance and remnants of bad housekeeping ("paintings" made with grease spatters and dust) to recent political commentary including a sculpture that simulates part of a downed American spy plane. Cultural exclusion and mutual misunderstanding are recurrent themes, evident in an immigration "interrogation room," two "towers of babel," and a huge toppled signpost whose flags point to countries against which the United States has waged war. Huang's views are especially pointed in "Amerigo Vespucci," a 2003 aluminum sculpture in the form of an Italian-bred bulldog relieving itself on a gallery wall; the urine cascades down into a puddle shaped like the United States.

http://www.startribune.com/stories/457/5677025.html

****************************

Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 14, 2005
Huang Yong Ping Who?
Famous in his Chinese homeland and avant-garde art circles, but unknown in the United States, Huang Yong Ping makes an American splash with a retrospective opening Sunday at Walker Art Center.
Mary Abbe; Staff Writer

With a pair of lion cages and a terrarium of reptiles and their live lunch - snakes, a toad, a gecko and some agitated crickets - Huang Yong Ping's show is expected to push even the avant-garde envelope when it debuts Sunday at Walker Art Center.

From pin-covered chairs to fingernail reliquaries, the Walker has offered many an oddity for public consumption, but no show in living memory has required the services of a taxidermist, zookeeper, pet store and aircraft junkyards as this one has.

Among the more spectacular items is "Bat Project IV," an enormous installation that includes the trashed cockpit of a decommissioned U.S. Navy EP-3 spy plane to which the Chinese-born artist has appended a 30-foot-long fuselage made of bamboo. There's also a 50-foot wooden python suspended from a gallery ceiling and, in the museum's lobby, a 40,000-pound sand-and-concrete replica of a Shanghai bank building.

The bank is expected to disintegrate by Jan. 15, when "House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective" ends its Minneapolis run. "Oracles" will be shown next year at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and later in Lyon, France. Negotiations are underway for presentations in China and Japan.

Exotic spectacles are typical of Huang, who is a quiet superstar in the rarefied world of international art expos, a pioneering intellectual in his homeland and a virtual unknown to most Americans. In the past decade, he has been in top-rank biennials in Brazil, Italy, Japan, China and South Africa. The Walker included him in a 1998 group show and owns a piece by him, but "Oracles" is his first major retrospective.

China to Paris: overlapping cultures

Since 1989, Huang has lived and worked in Paris, where Walker's deputy director Philippe Vergne, the show's curator, found him.

"It was an absolute revelation," Vergne said of his first visit to the artist's studio several years ago. "I did not know his work was so complex or consistent. To me it was one of the major art practices of the past 20 years. Everything was, for me, very different because the cultural references to Chinese mythology, bestiaries and philosophy were foreign to my frame of reference."

Born in Xiamen, China, in 1954, Huang grew up in a world largely closed to Western influence until the 1980s, when censorship eased. After graduating from an art academy in Zhejiang in 1982, he aligned himself with a group of artists experimenting with Western ideas. He made abstract paintings, but quickly began doing performances that subverted museums, art exhibitions and other institutions. Like European and American avant-gardists of the era - musician John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham, provocateur Joseph Beuys and the Fluxus group - he employed absurd Dadist strategies. He threw dice, used roulette wheels and consulted the I Ching or Chinese "Book of Changes," to free art from the harness of traditional culture.

Among his better-known work from the time was a series of sculptures made by tossing Chinese and European books into washing machines and reducing them to soggy pulp. Dried and displayed on packing crates, the pulp illustrated that there is no "logic, concept, or ethics" involved in cross-cultural exchanges, writes Chinese scholar Fei Dawei in the ex-hibition catalog.

"It is not about replacing one tradition with another, but rather about two cultures chaotically overlapping after their original structures have been pulverized," Fei Dawei added.

For all his iconoclasm, Huang enjoyed some official approval in his homeland when he was included in a show of avant-garde Chinese art at the National Art Gallery in Beijing in 1989. In April that year, he also was chosen for an in-ternational exposition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He became an accidental expatriate when Chinese offi-cials cracked down on protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Warned by friends not to return, he settled in Paris, where his wife joined him the following year.

"I didn't plan to stay," Huang said recently, speaking through an interpreter while overseeing installation of the Walker show. "I don't speak French. I don't speak English. I only have this tiny suitcase. When I got to Europe, there were a lot of shows and a lot of opportunities. That's why I decided to stay."

He and his wife, who also does installation art, now have a 10-year-old daughter, and he has mastered French.

Huang World at the Walker

The Walker's three-gallery show spans about 20 years and is conceived as a Huang universe, a strange mix of ancient and modern artifacts (3-foot-tall faux ceramic rice bowls filled with packaged food), mythological references (the py-thon-on-the ceiling), old and recent history (a wooden compass-chariot and the spy plane).

Colonialism and its legacy are a leitmotif in the first gallery, which includes a sculpture of an elephant under attack by a tiger. The crumbling Beaux-arts style model bank is another symbolic relic of European incursions into Asia.

The second gallery includes "House of Oracles," a tent full of Huang's tools and early abstractions. The terrarium of reptiles is intended as a metaphoric "theater of the world" or "gladiatorial arena" in which the creatures' conflicts are to be seen as a mirror of human relationships, said Walker officials.

"Some will survive and others not," Vergne said.

The reconstituted "spy plane" that dominates the third gallery has a curious history. It is the fourth incarnation of the "Bat Project," which Huang began after a U.S. spy plane nicknamed "the Bat" collided with a Chinese fighter jet in 2001. When he first sculpted part of the plane for a joint French-Chinese show, French officials prevented its display. A second effort for a show in southern China apparently was nixed by U.S. officials, although "what really happened is nebulous and he never got the full story," said Doryun Chong, the show's assistant curator.

Huang's third plane sculpture was purchased by a private collector in China and first shown in August in a private Chinese museum. Walker's version is the most ambitious, a full-scale re-creation of the cockpit and fuselage incorporating part of a junked plane that the Walker bought, had cut apart and shipped to the museum for Huang's manipulations.

"I hope people will identify that this is not art about art and realize that he is commenting on his time," said Vergne. "He's one of the rare artists who is not self-referential or commenting on pop culture. The work is about history and the present."

HOUSE OF ORACLES
What: Installations and monumental sculpture by Chinese-born, Paris-based Huang Yong Ping.
When: Sunday, through Jan. 15.
Where: Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Av., Mpls.

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

__________________________________________

An archive of this list as well as an subscribe/unsubscribe facility is
available at:
http://listserv.uni-heidelberg.de/archives/art-eastasia.html
For postings earlier than 2005-02-23 please go to:
http://www.fluktor.de/study/office/newsletter.htm


	October 22, 2005: [achtung! kunst] Huang Yongbing House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective

	AAP, October 22, 2005 Huang Yong Ping in Retrospect By Lindsay C. Messenger AAP Intern [image] The Walker Art Center proudly debuted the original showing of House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective to the public this Sunday. The House of Oracles exhibits two decades of Huang’s artistic efforts - as one body of work – in his first-ever retrospective. From imperialism to consumerism, Huang speaks through contemporary paintings, sculpture, and installations about the break up of empires and the resulting contradictions of modern society. His art provokes the uncertainty of national identity, while his themes venture east to west. Visitors venture through Huang’s life, his art, or as the artist would say, into “the belly of the beast.” “You are being digested… and then spit out,” describes Phillip Vergne, Chief Curator and Deputy Director of the Walker. [images] The retrospective was first conceived three years ago by Vergne and assistant curator Doryun Chong, who helped Huang catalogue all of his work. From there his menagerie has become a “total work of art,” an environment of unique dioramas and sculptural hybrids. In critiquing Huang’s art one challenges the meaning of contemporary art itself. In every piece of his body, culture is in question. Vergne recalls being in Paris with Huang and his art as “An overwhelming experience, revealing the extent to which the work was consistent, ambitious, sarcastic and humorous, and sharply subversive.” Contradictions are often found where they are not seen. At the entry of his gallery are four remnants of British imperialism, each missing something crucial. Lining the passage into the following gallery are two empty lion cages, which hold only the bones and excrement of the missing beast. Visitors enter into Huang’s belly of work, through two passages marked as airport immigration signs “national” and “other.” This notion of crossing boarders is familiar and a fitting entry – or exit – point. Already, the viewer is asked to question self-identity. Huang explores the spectrum of current, and past, global politics and societal conflicts. He looks at the demise of colonialism in Hong Kong’s China return, and at ancient Chinese traditions of medicine making. Current impressions of the American Empire and Chinese nationalism are also melded into the works. From beginning to the end, through digestion and regurgitation, the viewer is torn and contradicted, inundated with waves of Chinese tradition, and globalization. Huang’s gallery is a small universe, or an animal’s body, each work is a subset of metaphors. A gigantic gourd, a symbol of traditional Chinese medicine, lies near the spine of his work – that is represented by a 50-foot python suspended from the ceiling. A world map is a tabletop, on which rests an enclosure the shape of a turtle shell, where live snakes, millipedes, scorpions, and spiders crawl together in what he has entitled the “theater of the world.” This piece was inspired by the ancient Chinese tradition, where venomous animals would be put inside a jar for one year, anticipating the most potent animal would emerge. Some of Huang’s metaphorical subsets depict the end of empires. A statue of a fallen metal road sign with an American eagle atop it symbolizes all countries that have become victims of American violence. It is the archetypical symbol of royal sovereignty. Another piece is a Beaux Arts style bank from 1920s Shanghai, modeled from 40,000 pounds of sand and concrete – which is slowly disintegrating during the exhibition. “Two Typhoons” symbolizes the lack of communication and misunderstandings of the contemporary world. The piece, two towering Tibetan prayer wheels adorned with script from the Koran, was originally called the twin towers and then changed after 9/11. The transfer of Hong Kong from Great Britain to China is represented in oversized replicas of ceramic rice-bowls filled with out-dated British products with a July 1st 1997 expiration date, from when the event occurred. Huang’s most recent work is the Walker-commissioned Bat Project IV, a 40-foot tunnel made from the cockpit of a decommissioned plane, including bamboo scaffolding and plastic construction fences, filled with 300 stuffed bats, Chinese symbols of prosperity. This depicts the coming and going of war coverage in media, and has gone through three re-installments due to government censorship. Huang is a native of Xiamen, China, and since 1989 he has resided in Paris, France. After the Cultural Revolution he studied oil painting in Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. His artistic 1989 debut was in Magicians de la terre (magicians of the earth) in Pompidou. He is globally renowned, and has work featured in both the Sao Paulo and Shanghai Bienneals, and major museums in Europe, Asia, and the United States. He was a finalist in the 1998 biennial Hugo Boss Prize at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. That same year he was represented in the Walker’s Unfinished History exhibition. This retrospective is an opportunity for the American audience to piece together and understand the contradictions of modern China, for themselves. What does Huang hope to leave with his viewers: Their own impression of his work. “My work has all sorts of interpretations. I cannot subjectively impose that on them. It is up to them,” he laughs. This was told to the Asian American Press in translation, since he speaks French and Mandarin, not English. http://www.aapress.com/archive/2005/weboct21/a-huangping.htm ***************************** artdaily.com, 10/19/2005 House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective [image] Huang Yong Ping, 11 June 2002 - The Nightmare of George V, 2002. concrete, reinforced steel, animal skins, paint, fabric cushion, plastic, wood, and cane seat 96 x 140 x 66 in. Courtesy the artist, Paris. MINNEAPOLIS, MN.-The Walker Art Center presents House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective. This exhibition presents the first retrospective of the work of this contemporary chinese artist. Working with diverse traditions and media, Huang Yong Ping has created an artistic universe comprised of provocative installations that challenge the viewer to reconsider everything from the idea of art, to national identity, to recent history. Once one of the leading figures of the Xiamen Dada movement--a collective of artists interested in creating a new Chinese cultural identity by bridging trends in Western modernism with Chinese traditions of Zen and Taoism--Huang continues to confront established definitions of history and aesthetics. Huang's sculptures and installations--drawing on the legacies of Joseph Beuys, Arte Povera, and John Cage as well as traditional chinese art and philosophy--routinely juxtapose traditional objects or iconic images with modern references. Eight-Legged Hat (2000) pairs ancient Egyptian ibis with a pith helmet, reflecting Egypt's colonial past. Other works resonate with more recent events: Bat Project II (2002) is a replica of the wing from the U.S. spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter jet in 2001, setting off a weeklong international standoff. Two Typhoons (2001) consists of the prayer scrolls from a dismantled Tibetan prayer wheel, echoing the continuing conflict between Communist China and Buddhist Tibet. The exhibition will be accompanied by a major publication, the first to address the full range of Huang Yong Ping's artistic accomplishments. After its premiere at the Walker, the exhibition will be shown at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and venues in Asia and Europe. http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=15252&b=chinese%20art ************************ Star Tribune, October 19, 2005 Huang Yong Ping pokes cross-cultural fun Mary Abbe, Star Tribune The Walker's new retrospective by Chinese-born Huang Yong Ping carries some heavy intellectual baggage, but don't let allusions to Marcel Duchamp and Michel Foucault distract from the remarkable accessibility of "House of Oracles," a collection of strange objects that packs a huge visual punch. Rich with historical allusions and cross-cultural references, "Oracles" is a take-the-kids kind of exhibit that can be enjoyed on many levels: as a mordant commentary on the demise of European colonialism, as a critique of Eastern culture and Western art forms, as a poke in the eye to American military might or simply as a big celebration of Neo-Pop Chinese art. Nobody at the Walker is mentioning the P word, "Pop" being a decidedly uncool art style in high aesthetic circles these days. But there's an undeniably Pop look to much of Huang's sculpture, which, like the work of Claes Oldenburg, alters the scale and materials of ordinary objects for psychological effect. Where Oldenburg enlarged a spoon and cherry into a playful sculpture of monumental size, Huang made Chinese rice bowls bigger than bathtubs and added a droll political spin by filling them with prepackaged food that expired in July 1997, the date when the British ended more than a century of colonial domination by returning Hong Kong to the Chinese. Other Pop moments include a closet-sized gourd full of dried roots, snakeskins and other ancient tonics (the gourd being a traditional container for Chinese medicine), and a 40,000-pound sand-and-concrete model of a Beaux-Arts style Shanghai bank whose decay over the next few months will serve as a reminder of the waning import of Western concepts in Asia. For Americans, Huang is unusual because his perspective remains distinctively Chinese and highly critical of the West despite his having lived in Paris since 1989. The show spans 20 years, from muddy abstractions he made using the I Ching, roulette-style games of chance and remnants of bad housekeeping ("paintings" made with grease spatters and dust) to recent political commentary including a sculpture that simulates part of a downed American spy plane. Cultural exclusion and mutual misunderstanding are recurrent themes, evident in an immigration "interrogation room," two "towers of babel," and a huge toppled signpost whose flags point to countries against which the United States has waged war. Huang's views are especially pointed in "Amerigo Vespucci," a 2003 aluminum sculpture in the form of an Italian-bred bulldog relieving itself on a gallery wall; the urine cascades down into a puddle shaped like the United States. http://www.startribune.com/stories/457/5677025.html ************************** Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 14, 2005 Huang Yong Ping Who? Famous in his Chinese homeland and avant-garde art circles, but unknown in the United States, Huang Yong Ping makes an American splash with a retrospective opening Sunday at Walker Art Center. Mary Abbe; Staff Writer With a pair of lion cages and a terrarium of reptiles and their live lunch - snakes, a toad, a gecko and some agitated crickets - Huang Yong Ping's show is expected to push even the avant-garde envelope when it debuts Sunday at Walker Art Center. From pin-covered chairs to fingernail reliquaries, the Walker has offered many an oddity for public consumption, but no show in living memory has required the services of a taxidermist, zookeeper, pet store and aircraft junkyards as this one has. Among the more spectacular items is "Bat Project IV," an enormous installation that includes the trashed cockpit of a decommissioned U.S. Navy EP-3 spy plane to which the Chinese-born artist has appended a 30-foot-long fuselage made of bamboo. There's also a 50-foot wooden python suspended from a gallery ceiling and, in the museum's lobby, a 40,000-pound sand-and-concrete replica of a Shanghai bank building. The bank is expected to disintegrate by Jan. 15, when "House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective" ends its Minneapolis run. "Oracles" will be shown next year at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and later in Lyon, France. Negotiations are underway for presentations in China and Japan. Exotic spectacles are typical of Huang, who is a quiet superstar in the rarefied world of international art expos, a pioneering intellectual in his homeland and a virtual unknown to most Americans. In the past decade, he has been in top-rank biennials in Brazil, Italy, Japan, China and South Africa. The Walker included him in a 1998 group show and owns a piece by him, but "Oracles" is his first major retrospective. China to Paris: overlapping cultures Since 1989, Huang has lived and worked in Paris, where Walker's deputy director Philippe Vergne, the show's curator, found him. "It was an absolute revelation," Vergne said of his first visit to the artist's studio several years ago. "I did not know his work was so complex or consistent. To me it was one of the major art practices of the past 20 years. Everything was, for me, very different because the cultural references to Chinese mythology, bestiaries and philosophy were foreign to my frame of reference." Born in Xiamen, China, in 1954, Huang grew up in a world largely closed to Western influence until the 1980s, when censorship eased. After graduating from an art academy in Zhejiang in 1982, he aligned himself with a group of artists experimenting with Western ideas. He made abstract paintings, but quickly began doing performances that subverted museums, art exhibitions and other institutions. Like European and American avant-gardists of the era - musician John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham, provocateur Joseph Beuys and the Fluxus group - he employed absurd Dadist strategies. He threw dice, used roulette wheels and consulted the I Ching or Chinese "Book of Changes," to free art from the harness of traditional culture. Among his better-known work from the time was a series of sculptures made by tossing Chinese and European books into washing machines and reducing them to soggy pulp. Dried and displayed on packing crates, the pulp illustrated that there is no "logic, concept, or ethics" involved in cross-cultural exchanges, writes Chinese scholar Fei Dawei in the ex-hibition catalog. "It is not about replacing one tradition with another, but rather about two cultures chaotically overlapping after their original structures have been pulverized," Fei Dawei added. For all his iconoclasm, Huang enjoyed some official approval in his homeland when he was included in a show of avant-garde Chinese art at the National Art Gallery in Beijing in 1989. In April that year, he also was chosen for an in-ternational exposition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. He became an accidental expatriate when Chinese offi-cials cracked down on protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Warned by friends not to return, he settled in Paris, where his wife joined him the following year. "I didn't plan to stay," Huang said recently, speaking through an interpreter while overseeing installation of the Walker show. "I don't speak French. I don't speak English. I only have this tiny suitcase. When I got to Europe, there were a lot of shows and a lot of opportunities. That's why I decided to stay." He and his wife, who also does installation art, now have a 10-year-old daughter, and he has mastered French. Huang World at the Walker The Walker's three-gallery show spans about 20 years and is conceived as a Huang universe, a strange mix of ancient and modern artifacts (3-foot-tall faux ceramic rice bowls filled with packaged food), mythological references (the py-thon-on-the ceiling), old and recent history (a wooden compass-chariot and the spy plane). Colonialism and its legacy are a leitmotif in the first gallery, which includes a sculpture of an elephant under attack by a tiger. The crumbling Beaux-arts style model bank is another symbolic relic of European incursions into Asia. The second gallery includes "House of Oracles," a tent full of Huang's tools and early abstractions. The terrarium of reptiles is intended as a metaphoric "theater of the world" or "gladiatorial arena" in which the creatures' conflicts are to be seen as a mirror of human relationships, said Walker officials. "Some will survive and others not," Vergne said. The reconstituted "spy plane" that dominates the third gallery has a curious history. It is the fourth incarnation of the "Bat Project," which Huang began after a U.S. spy plane nicknamed "the Bat" collided with a Chinese fighter jet in 2001. When he first sculpted part of the plane for a joint French-Chinese show, French officials prevented its display. A second effort for a show in southern China apparently was nixed by U.S. officials, although "what really happened is nebulous and he never got the full story," said Doryun Chong, the show's assistant curator. Huang's third plane sculpture was purchased by a private collector in China and first shown in August in a private Chinese museum. Walker's version is the most ambitious, a full-scale re-creation of the cockpit and fuselage incorporating part of a junked plane that the Walker bought, had cut apart and shipped to the museum for Huang's manipulations. "I hope people will identify that this is not art about art and realize that he is commenting on his time," said Vergne. "He's one of the rare artists who is not self-referential or commenting on pop culture. The work is about history and the present." HOUSE OF ORACLES What: Installations and monumental sculpture by Chinese-born, Paris-based Huang Yong Ping. When: Sunday, through Jan. 15. Where: Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Av., Mpls. __________________ with kind regards, Matthias Arnold (Art-Eastasia list) http://www.chinaresource.org http://www.fluktor.de __________________________________________ An archive of this list as well as an subscribe/unsubscribe facility is available at: http://listserv.uni-heidelberg.de/archives/art-eastasia.html For postings earlier than 2005-02-23 please go to: http://www.fluktor.de/study/office/newsletter.htm