House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
October 16, 2005 - January 15, 2006
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 premieres at the Walker Art Center, 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.
WALKER ART CENTER
725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403
