Huang Yongping Overview

Huang Yongping is a rebel who playfully rejects cultural dogma. He identifies neither with Asian tradition nor with trends imported from the West -- though he employs both. His work is a perpetual contestation of received ideas, an attempt both to... [more]

Huang Yongping is a rebel who playfully rejects cultural dogma. He identifies neither with Asian tradition nor with trends imported from the West -- though he employs both. His work is a perpetual contestation of received ideas, an attempt both to empty cultural space of its ideological clutter and to prevent new ideologies from filling the void. It's a kind of cultural confusion through dislocation and displacement, an undermining of hegemonic power by means of ancient irrationalism and modern iconoclasm. His "Indigestible Object" (1992) is exemplary. Huang spread hundreds of kilograms of rice over the floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Prato, Italy, in a kind of force-feeding of the art institution. Huang's intent was not to assimilate cultures, but to emphasize their irreconcilable differences. Neither the Western museum nor the Eastern food sits easy after the one is stuffed into the other; both cultures suffer an irremediable indigestion. Another well-known piece is "A History of Chinese Painting" and "'A Concise History of Modern Painting' Washed in a Washing Machine for Two Minutes" (1987/1993). Huang tossed two canonical art texts into the washer, extracted the undifferentiated mass of soaked pulp, and mounted it on a piece of broken glass. Western and Eastern traditions emerge mashed together into an unrecognizable lump. Huang sees texts as forms of institutional power that saturate society with dogma. His reaction is to dismantle this power -- not in the interest of promoting a different dogma, but to create an open, free space of cultural production. Yet it's difficult not to see Huang as replaying the strategies of Western art exemplified in dada and Deconstruction. In fact, in 1986 Huang formed "Xiamen Dada," a group that practiced a kind of Deconstructive art of the citation: they inserted propaganda images and texts into anachronous situations to foreground the disjunctions that make up modern China. The group also claimed to take inspiration from Chan Buddhism, which seeks to set the individual free from all doctrines and dogmas. Whether or not such art is merely a new form of nihilism, and whether or not a productive project lingers behind Huang's onslaught of negations, still remains to be seen. [show less]