nonstarvingartists.com, 12-02-2005
Walker Art Center Hosts First Retrospective of Chinese Artist Huang Yong
Ping
Jennifer Dawson

[image] (United States-Minneapolis) Celebrating an artist who offers
alternatives to a Eurocentric world view, the exhibition "House of
Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective" navigates the divide between
East and West, tradition and the avant-garde.

The first retrospective of this Chinese-born, Paris-based artist
premiered at the Walker Art Center October 16, 2005 and runs through
January 15, 2006, before traveling to Massachusetts next year and to
international venues to be announced. House of Oracles showcases
drawings, sculptural objects, and installations from 1985 to the
present, including the Walker-commissioned Bat Project IV, a re-creation
of a section of the U.S. surveillance plane that set off an
international controversy in 2001 when it collided with a Chinese
fighter jet.

Working across 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 the leading figure of the
mid-1980s 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 as well as
contemporary reality - Huang continues to confront established
definitions of history and aesthetics. His sculptures and installations
- drawing on the Western legacies of Joseph Beuys, Arte Povera, and John
Cage, among others, as well as traditional Chinese art and philosophy -
routinely juxtapose traditional objects or iconic images with modern
references.

An important presence in the global art world since he participated in
the groundbreaking 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la terre (Magicians of
the Earth) at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris, Huang has shown his often breathtaking sculptures and
installations in major contemporary art venues and at prestigious
festivals in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. He was invited to the 2004
São Paulo Biennale, the 2003 Venice Biennale, the 2001 Yokohama
Triennale, the 2000 Shanghai Biennial, and the 1997 Gwangju and Johannes
Biennales. He has been included in group exhibitions at, among many
others, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, P.S. 1 and the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Chicago, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. He
represented France (with Jean-Pierre Bertrand) at the 1999 Venice
Biennale and was a finalist in the biennial Hugo Boss Prize, held at the
Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1998. Huang is represented in the
Walker's collection and was included in its 1998 exhibition Unfinished
History.

The Walker's retrospective exhibition began to take shape following
deputy director and chief curator Philippe Vergne's visit to Huang's
studio three years ago. There, Vergne paged through notebooks that
meticulously catalogued ideas, commentaries, and documentation of two
decades of the artist's work. This visit was "an overwhelming
experience, revealing the extent to which the work was consistent,
ambitious, sarcastic and humorous, and sharply subversive," recalls
Vergne. "It also confirmed that Huang's work, which seems to question
all my certitudes about art and artmaking, was not geared towards easily
achieved success or recognition, but aimed at changing, shifting the
nature of aesthetic discourse."

The resulting exhibition, House of Oracles, was conceived as a "total
work of art," a singular, immersive sculptural environment that is a
hybrid of fun house, diorama, and menagerie. Realized in collaboration
with Vergne and assistant curator Doryun Chong, the exhibition was
designed by Huang as a metaphorical - and sometimes literal - journey
through the "belly of the beast." One of the first works viewers come
upon is a monumental sculpture of an elephant mounted by a snarling
tiger, a commentary on hunting safaris of bygone colonial days.
Following this are passages formed by cages once inhabited by lions,
with routes marked by light boxes reminiscent of an airport immigration
checkpoint: "National" and "Other." The "spine" of the installation, a
50-foot wood python suspended from the ceiling, leads viewers to a
replica of a Beaux Arts-style bank building from 1920s Shanghai, molded
from 40,000 pounds of sand and concrete and slowly disintegrating during
the exhibition's run. The final section is dominated by the
Walker-commissioned Bat Project IV, a 40-foot tunnel made from the
cockpit of a decommissioned military plane - adorned inside with 300
stuffed bats - bamboo scaffolding, and plastic construction fences.

At the core of Huang's work is a challenge to the accepted notions of
art and what it does. The exhibition's title, shared by one of the works
on view, suggests the stimulating and awe-inspiring - perhaps even
unsettling - experience the viewer might have. For when one enters a
house of oracles, one does not exit without being profoundly changed by
the experience.

House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective will be accompanied by
a 250-page fully illustrated catalogue, the first to address the full
range of Huang Yong Ping's artistic accomplishments. Included will be an
anthology of the artist's writings translated for the first time into
English; essays by Vergne and critic-curators Hou Hanru and Fei Dawei;
and a conceptual map and dictionary on the artist's work by Chong. ($45;
$40.50 Walker members)

http://www.nonstarvingartists.com/News/ImagedNewsItem.2005-12-02.5529.html

 

__________________

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