Huang Yongping

b. 1954, Xiamen, Fujian

Artist

Huang Yongping was one of the first and most influential Chinese artists to gain international notoriety. After graduating from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou in 1982 he founded the group Xiamen Dada. This avant-garde movement claimed to take inspiration from both Chan Buddhism and Western Dadaism.

Since the political upheavals of 1989, Huang Yongping has made Paris his home. Much of his work since comments on cultural conflict and cultural imperialism. Influenced as much by Duchamp as by Daoism and the Yijing, his artwork functions as philosophical statements that reflect various social and political phenomena of the post-colonial era. His work often involves an explicit collision of Western and Eastern iconography in an attempt to negotiate confounded cultural space in the era of globalization. Huang’s large-scale, often site-specific installations employ traditional Chinese objects and themes and occasionally live animals and insects. Le Pont et le théâtre du monde (1993–5) is an elaborate cage that contains over 700 different snakes, lizards and insects. As a Hugo Boss Prize recipient in 1998, Huang suspended metal mesh bags containing black widow spiders throughout the space. Huang’s work has been included in many major exhibitions, including ‘Chinese Hand-Laundry’ at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York 1993); the French Pavilion at the 1999 Venice Biennale, where he was chosen to officially represent France; ‘Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s–1980s’ at the Queens Museum of Art; ‘Cities on the Move’ in 1998 and 1999, and ‘Inside/Out: New Chinese Art’ at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Asia Society galleries in 1999. At the 2003 Venice Biennale Huang presented a documentary piece, Bat Project I&II, which reconstructs the artist’s two attempts to recreate a life-size model of the US EP-3 spy plane that was forced to land on Hainan Island in April 2001 after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet. The installation piece, scheduled to be exhibited in Shenzhen (2001) and Guangzhou (2002), was in both cases denied permission due to American authorities in Guangzhou.

the official involvement of both Chinese and

Further reading

Borysevicz, Mathieu (1999). ‘Huang Yongping in Venice’. In John Clark (ed.), Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium. Hong Kong: New Media Limited, 210–12.

Fei, Dawei (ed.) (2003). Huang Yongping’s Work ‘Bat Project II’. Orsieres: Guy and Myriam Ullens Foundation.

Hou, Hanru (1994). ‘Departure Lounge Art, Chinese Artists Abroad’. Art and Asia Pacific 1:2.

——(1998). Huang Yong Ping (exhibition catalogue). Fondation de Appel: Amsterdam.

Jouanno, Evelyne (1999). ‘Huang Yong Ping’. Flash Art (June).

Köppel-Yang, Martina (2000). ‘A Transcultural Roulette’s Game: Huang Yongping’s Roulette Series and Recent Related Works’. In Wu Hong (ed.), Chinese Art at the Crossroads: Between Past and Future, Between East and West. Hong Kong: New Art Media, 314–28.

——(2003). ‘A Bat’s Life, or Big Brother is Watching You’. Yishu—Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1.2.

MATHIEU BORYSEVICZ