Huang Yong Ping

When “House of Oracles” opened in Vancouver, media and public excitement abounded. A retrospective exhibition of the work of expatriate-Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping, it called into focus the West’s growing interest—cultural, political and economic—in the world’s most populous nation. Just as China has emerged as the biggest economy on the planet, its contemporary art is now commanding huge attention (and huge prices) in the international art market. Fifteen years ago, it was said that the 21st century would belong to Asia, and now Huang’s spectacular and politically charged show pulls that prediction into sharp focus.

Not that the Paris-based artist celebrates his former homeland’s rampant development, authoritarian government and military might. Huang devotes a lot of his creative energy to questioning authority and examining abusive power structures, on both sides of the East-West divide. Although the critique and deconstruction of colonialism and imperialism are among the notable themes in his work, he is equally aware of the follies and abuses of post-colonial power structures, in the developing world and elsewhere. Hegemony, his work suggests, engenders more hegemony.

Still, despite, or perhaps because of, his expat status and his continuing critical stance, Huang has had a significant impact on contemporary art practice in China. Without his example (and that of other expatriate Chinese artists of his generation, notably Cai Guo- Qiang and the late Chen Zhen), emerging artists in China would not be able to launch their work in the international art world. An esteemed member of China’s original avant-garde (and a founder of the group known as Xiamen Dada), Huang left China in 1989 and settled in Paris. (His wife, artist Shen Yuan, joined him there the following year. A small show of her sculptural installations opened at Vancouver’s Centre A at the same time as Huang’s show opened at the VAG.)

In published interviews, Huang has explained that his art falls into two periods, the first occurring when he was still working in China and the second, after his move to the West. This divide is certainly evident in “House of Oracles,” which was organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The pre-1989 works, although intellectually provocative, are unprepossessing in scale and materials. They are evidently shaped by Huang’s early interest in 1960s conceptualism, and also by his abiding admiration for the work and philosophy of Marcel Duchamp. In the mid-1980s, it seems, Huang was trying to break with Chinese tradition and compress the entire history of 20th-century Western art into his understanding and his creative practice. A brilliant example of, and play upon, his process of self-education and cultural realignment is The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes, originally created in China in 1987 and recreated in 1993. It consists of a lump of paper pulp (the result of the two books washed together, as cited in the title) balanced on a piece of broken glass set over an open wooden tea chest. The raised lid of the chest is inscribed with handwritten Chinese characters, as is its front panel. (No translation is given in the show, so we’re left to assume that at least some of the text is the title, which is also the premise of the work.)

While taking members of the media through Huang’s show, Walker Art Center curator Philippe Vergne described this piece as an attempt to give shape to a “different form of modernity,” one that deconstructs the cultural canon of both West and East in order to create a third way of looking. Vergne insisted that the artist cannot be pigeonholed as either Chinese or French, that his art both critiques and transcends cultural stereotypes, and that it is truly global in character. Vergne also stated, in droll terms, that Huang “uses the East to beat up the West and uses the West to beat up the East,” a nifty summation of his practice.

Another early conceptual piece is Dust, 1987, which consists of a long, wide scroll of paper, unfurled from a wooden crate and displaying variously thick and thin accumulations of dust. The dust settled on the paper during the 16 months it lay on the floor of the artist’s studio in Xiamen. (Dates, from 87.4.20 to 88.8.15, are handwritten along one edge of the paper.) Again, this is a work that percolates East and West together: it draws inspiration from an occasion on which Duchamp asked Man Ray to photograph the dust under his bed, and it also references Taoist and Zen Buddhist philosophies of non-intervention.

The work functions in Huang’s oeuvre as a “painting,” one in which dust stands in for pigment and the artist’s hand and brush are purposefully absent. Another sort of painting, Kitchen, consists of a rectangle of raw canvas, placed behind a small, ceramic stove and splattered with cooking oil for a period of time. Banal circumstance has dictated the appearance of what might pass for Abstract Expressionism, again minus the element of personal mark making.

Other 1980s works conflate Western modernist ideas about chance (again revealing Huang’s fascination with Duchamp, along with John Cage and Merce Cunningham) with Chinese traditions of gambling and, eventually, divination. The I Ching (Book of Changes) is a factor in House of Oracles, 1989–1992, the work that lends its name to the exhibition. Here, within a military-style tent filled with divining instruments, Huang alludes to both Chinese and American approaches to war (with a topical reference to the first Gulf War). The I Ching, Huang has written, has become part of his strategy to “shake off Western influences” and undermine the artist’s authorial voice.

Before and after his defection to the West, Huang has sourced his art in his extensive readings in both Western and Eastern philosophies. His work also examines international clashes of power and ideology, alludes to avant-gardism and other aspects of Western art history, and critiques the relationship among the museum, the artist and the viewer. As mentioned above, colonialism continues to be a rich field of investigation and commentary for Huang. An example is Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank, a shed-sized replica of a former imperial bank building erected by the British in Shanghai in 1923 and later “repurposed” by the communist Chinese government. Huang’s 6 by 4.3 by 3.5-metre model is composed of an unstable mixture of sand and cement that slowly crumbles through the run of the show.

After Huang’s move to the West, his modest early works gave way to much larger and more ambitious mixed-media sculpture and sculptural installations. Little explanation exists for his considerable shift in form and scale—the leap from subtle, anti-commodity, conceptual work to circus-like spectacle. In an interview at the time of the show’s opening, Huang told me, “Being in France, I’ve been exposed to a wider spectrum of cultural experience and this has also been a very important aspect of the work.” Although clearly still concept-driven, Huang’s art since the early 1990s could hardly be said to be “conceptual” in the dematerialized, 1960s sense of the word. It is difficult to reconcile the monumentality, materiality and spectacularity that have increasingly characterized his art with his stated determination to confound or refute the ego-driven Western myth of the artist. Greater creative freedom, access to more abundant resources and high visibility within the museum and gallery world don’t entirely explain the radical alteration of the look of Huang’s art. The metamorphosis is one I’m still puzzling over.

Huang deploys depictions of animals as political and cultural symbols in a number of his artworks, including the nearly life-size replicas of elephant and tiger in 11 June 2002—The Nightmare of George V. A condemnation, again, of colonialism, it refers to a tiger-hunting expedition in Nepal in 1911 in which England’s King George V participated. In one notable instance, Huang incorporated live animals into an artwork, provoking a protracted controversy at the VAG. The piece, Theatre of the World, consists of a turtle-shaped wood and wire mesh cage, whose form references Western concepts about prison architecture and surveillance and Eastern shamanistic practices and beliefs. For a while, the cage was occupied by a group of incompatible creatures, including tarantulas, scorpions, millipedes, crickets, cockroaches, geckos, snakes and frogs. Some of the creatures were predatory, some were poisonous and some were dinner, and, as they played out their relationships with each other over the course of the exhibition, they were meant to suggest human conflicts and power dynamics. Our willingness to watch the natural or accidental attrition among these creatures was also meant to correspond with our increasing numbness to media violence.

The controversy Theatre provoked, however, had nothing to do with its conceptual premise, nor with its cultural and political points of reference. Rather, Theatre was the focus of complaints from some visitors to the gallery and the local offices of the Humane Society and the SPCA. According to the abundant media coverage, the animal protection agencies were concerned about the “stress” the animals were undergoing, and made a series of recommendations to the VAG for adjusting the conditions of the display (recommendations with which the VAG complied). They then asked for the removal of some of the creatures from the work, and this latter request caused the artist to withdraw all of them, citing the compromise that such changes would represent to his artwork. He also expressed his great disappointment at an act he and many others evidently viewed as a denial of his right to freedom of expression.

Since the controversy and deactivation of the work, documentation of its media coverage, along with a flurry of notes posted from visitors to the show, has been on view at the VAG, adjacent to Theatre’s empty cage. It could be argued that such coverage was a significant aspect of the unfurling of Huang’s concept. Not, perhaps, what he originally intended, but in keeping with his underlying interest in power dynamics, the intercession of chance and the disengagement of the artist’s ego from the creation of a work of art.

My first viewing of Theatre of the World was disturbing, even revolting, possibly because I don’t like looking at animals in cages, especially when they are crawling all over each other in unnatural juxtaposition. Perhaps my reaction was what the artist intended it to be. Theatre is not, after all, a petting zoo. It is not a celebration of cuteness, nor is it intended to be a microcosm of tolerance and altruism. Still, part of what the artist’s supporters saw as ludicrous behaviour on the part of animal protection workers was the supposed concern for creatures most people would readily exterminate if they ran out from under their fridge. Ratchet that concern up, though, from cockroaches to geckos, and you begin to see how the issues raised speak to our unwillingness to grant the possibility of suffering among what we perceive to be lower orders of animals.

Anxieties about animal welfare aside (although perhaps that condition isn’t possible), I’m not convinced that Theatre of the World as originally staged is one of Huang’s best or most persuasive works of art. The metaphors don’t fully cohere, nor do the architectural, social and cultural references fully engage me. In some ways, the closing of the work stimulates more radical ideas than its opening. A whole raft of values is called into question and somewhere, somewhere, the ghost of Marcel Duchamp is chuckling. ■

“House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective” was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery from April 5 to September 16, 2007. It was organized and circulated by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Robin Laurence is a writer, curator and a contributing editor to Border Crossings from Vancouver.