The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Transformation is at the heart of Huang Yong Ping’s work. It directs his conceptual and formal methods, drives his production process, and shapes his view of the artist’s role in the world. His art is constructed from elaborate systems of signs and strategies which can initially appear hermetic, but which also, as curator Hou Hanru has observed, ‘endow [the work] with ultimate dynamism and vitality’. 1 Referencing esoteric Chinese texts and cosmologies, as well as historical events and contemporary situations, Huang aims to unsettle established knowledge systems, embracing the potential for ambiguity, instability, coexistence and flux. This is evident in the two important phases in the artist’s work: pre 1989, when he was still in China, and post 1989, after immigrating to France, where he lives today. His Chinese work, made at a time when the country was opening up after the Cultural Revolution, reflects the energetic absorption of new ideas. While studying at the Zhejiang Academy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Huang gained access to texts (in Chinese translation) by the European philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, as well as the work of Marcel Duchamp and composer John Cage. He found that the deconstructive strategies of Dada, with its rejection of the linear rationalism of Modernism, resonated strongly with Daoist and Zen Buddhist thought and their ready acceptance of change. From the mid 1980s, he was a leading figure in the influential avant-garde group Xiamen Dada, which staged several radical events where art works were burned or replaced with construction materials. Both Dada and I Ching ( Book of Changes ), the ancient Chinese divination manual, draw on elements of chance, which was a significant strategy for Huang. In 1985, he constructed a set of roulette wheels that featured instructions based on I Ching hexagrams. These devices enabled him to make artistic choices in a way that transferred responsibility to forces outside his control, thereby questioning the limits of artistic agency and the modernist imperatives of creativity, originality and innovation. As he wrote at the time, ‘Pursuing innovation is meaningless, and pursuing non-innovation is meaningless, because “pursuing” is the source of meaninglessness’. 2 Since 1989, Huang has been making largely site-specific works for galleries and museums all over the world. This shift from a local to a global context effected a shift in his approach; he became less concerned with ‘what art is, but rather, its role in terms of site and place’. 3 The transformative dimension of his work over this time has often been deployed physically, shifting audience experiences of space, and introducing unfamiliar and provocative elements into major exhibitions and gallery environments. Works such as Yellow Peril and Theatre du Monde , both 1993, for example, brought together live insects and reptiles in large cages, where they played out primal life- and-death struggles in metaphorical representations of inter-ethnic conflict. Bat Project 2001–05 reconstructed a US surveillance plane, the subject of a diplomatic crisis when it collided with a Chinese jet over China in 2001. Different sections of the aircraft were produced for different exhibitions; however, in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, the work was censored to avoid new diplomatic incidents. Huang’s use of scale — in miniaturised tableaux or monumental structures — generates theatrical effects that draw audiences to the works, sometimes literally. He regularly refers to cages, caves and architecture, creating enclosures in which action can be contained and observed. 4 These motifs also suggest a threshold between one reality and another, as being between the human and natural worlds. This relationship between art (culture) and nature is fundamental to Huang’s work, where natural materials, animals and plants are used both as media and as subject matter, drawing on a wide range of cultural and historical references that are transformed depending on context. Central to Huang’s complex bestiary is the snake. The snake/dragon is often associated with China, but is an important symbol in many cultures, variously expressing creation, sexual temptation, wisdom and deception. Returning to the motif repeatedly, this ambiguity ensures multiple readings of Huang’s work. Ressort 2012 is the latest in a series of gigantic snake skeleton sculptures that includes Python 2000, a 40-metre wooden snake designed to cut through a bridge in Germany; Tower Snake 2009, in which the skeleton’s ribs create vaulted arches atop a spiralling bamboo ramp; and Serpent d’océan 2012, permanently installed on the shoreline of a beach in Nantes, France. Specially designed for the Queensland Art Gallery’s Watermall, Ressort coils like an aluminium spring from the ceiling to the pool at ground level, symbolically linking the water with the sky. 5 Its enormous scale is both monstrous and magical, its gaping mouth suggesting an omnivorous appetite, ready to transform its surroundings through some alchemical digestive process. Ressort epitomises the ability of Huang Yong Ping to combine openness of interpretation with deep connections to belief and experience, where the only certainty is change. Russell Storer 1 Hou Hanru, ‘Change is the rule’, in Philippe Vergne and Doryun Chong (eds.), House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective [exhibition catalogue], Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2005, p.12. 2 Huang Yong Ping, ‘On the question of language in art’ [excerpt], in Vergne and Chong (eds.), p.85. 3 ‘Roundtable discussion: Pauline J Yao with Doryun Chong, Huang Yong Ping and Philippe Vergne’, Yishu , vol.5 no.1, March 2006, p.49. 4 See Jessica Morgan, ‘Bestiary’, in Emma-Charlotte Gobry-Laurencin (ed.), Wu Zei [exhibition catalogue], Musée Océanographique de Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris, pp.32–5, for a discussion of this theme in Huang’s work. 5 The word ‘ressort’ is French for spring, but can also mean resilience or energy. HUANG YONG PING Shedding one’s skin 124