Huang Yong Ping

Huang Yong Ping (born February 18, 1954, Xiamen, China—died October 19, 2019, Paris, France) was a Chinese-born French avant-garde artist, best known for his massive installations that explore East-West perspectives.

Huang began his studies in 1977 at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China Academy of Art) in Hangzhou, shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). China was just beginning to have greater access to the West, and Huang was drawn to such artists as Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg and the composer John Cage, individuals who questioned the institutions, beliefs, and nature of art. Huang’s early works—notably Four Paintings Created According to Random Instructions (1985) and The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes (1987)—show his own iconoclastic vision. For the latter piece, Huang questioned the East-West division taught in standard art history textbooks by placing one on Chinese art and one on Western art in a washing machine. The resulting pile of paper pulp was exhibited on top of a wooden box.

Huang gained national notice in 1986 as a founder of Xiamen Dada, a circle of like-minded anarchic artists. They held their first exhibition that year, and, after it ended, the group burned all of the artwork. In doing so, Huang contended that art exists in the spiritual process of creating, not in the finished product.

In 1989 Huang traveled to Paris to participate in the exhibition “Magiciens de la terre” at the Pompidou Centre. While he was in Paris, the Tiananmen Square incident took place, and he chose to stay abroad. As an Eastern artist living by choice in the West, Huang increasingly engaged the paradoxical East-West duality in his work. The House of Oracles (1989–92) featured a divining apparatus of diverse traditions, and Theater of the World – Bridge (1993) introduced the recurring snake as a charged cultural symbol with contradictory meanings in his art. In the East the snake symbolizes intelligence, happiness, and auspiciousness, while in the West it is regarded as a demonic entity. Huang represented France in 1999 at the 48th Venice Biennale and became a French citizen that year.

Huang often courted controversy, notably with Bat Project (2001–05), which featured a replica of the U.S. EP-3 spy plane with a bat logo on its tail fin that collided in April 2001 with a Chinese aircraft and made an emergency landing on Hainan Island. In the installation, he presented display cases filled with historical material and memorabilia that referenced the Hainan Island incident, which resulted in a heated dispute between the United States and China. Huang also hung taxidermic bats in the shattered cockpit windows to reflect the logo on the plane as well as to underscore the cultural differences between the East and the West. In the East bats symbolize good luck, and in the West bats are sometimes feared. In other works, he used live animals and drew the ire of animal rights groups.

The snake skeleton, however, became his signature form in the early 21st century. Conceived on a titanic scale, the snake broke through the Mühlenbrücke, a covered bridge in Münden, Germany, for Python (2000); rose out of the Loire River near Nantes, France, for Serpent d’océan (2012); appeared as the key work in his 2014 retrospective Bâton Serpent at Rome’s National Museum of XXI Century Arts (MAXXI); and turned up in the installation Empires for the monthlong 2016 Monumenta exhibit. For the latter installation, Huang arranged 305 brightly coloured international shipping containers in eight piles in the soaring space beneath the steel-and-glass vaults of the Art Nouveau-style Grand Palais in Paris. The two shortest stacks supported a colossal replica of Napoleon Bonaparte’s bicorne hat, while a 130-ton, 820-foot- (250-metre-) long aluminum snake skeleton undulated around the grandly scaled ensemble. In Empires Huang addressed the global economy, which he viewed as tainted by colonial history and driven by the demands of rising nations in a “hunger for power.”