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 in Paris, Huang Yong Ping passed away October 20, 2019 at age 65. In commemoration of his life and legacy, we share a text by Kathy Halbreich, then-director of the Walker Art Center, from the 2005 catalogue for House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, the first retrospective of this influential Chinese-born, Paris-based artist. More recently the Museum of Modern Art’s associate director and its first Laurenz Foundation Curator, Halbreich notes that two of Huang’s artworks—Trousers with Firecrackers (1987) and Palanquin (2002)—are featured in MoMA’s contemporary galleries.
These are particularly contentious times in which any commitment to the linearity and inevitability of progress is puzzling at best and potentially lethal at worst. As new knowledge and ancient beliefs circulate and often collide, only change—in both its most subtle and its most unrestrained manifestations—remains a constant, and few are more adept than artists at dealing with such fluidity. In a recent interview in the New York Times Book Review describing how modernism (and its notions of the avant-garde) is now more a dated concept than a stable truth, V. S. Naipaul said: “We are all overwhelmed by the idea of French 19th-century culture. Everybody wanted to go to Paris to paint or to write. And of course that’s a dead idea these days. We’ve changed. The world has changed. The world has grown bigger.”
So how do cultural institutions, particularly those devoted to making sense of the modern world and contemporary art, adapt to and reflect these changes? Certainly the history of art, itself only an index of the most recognized ways in which some artists and artisans have given form to cultural values, must begin to mirror a more porous and pliant narrative.
By opening its methodology to less certainty and greater discovery, the Walker began to slowly reconsider the institutionalized pantheon of Western modernity, its foundation and its consequences. Less is no longer more in the twenty-first century. In presenting the first retrospective of the work of Huang Yong Ping, the Walker continues its commitment to providing artists with new opportunities, apart from considerations of the art market or audience familiarity.
Huang Yong Ping set foot in the Walker for the first time in 1998. The context was the group exhibition Unfinished History, guest-curated by Francesco Bonami with assistance from Douglas Fogle. This relatively long history has led to this exhibition—an exhibition that follows another Walker tradition, which is to commit to artists early in their careers and remain committed. While such behavior is often perceived as risky, this tradition has been good for the institution, creating relationships with an impressive list of artists, among them Matthew Barney, Chuck Close, Lucio Fontana, Robert Gober, Mario Merz, and Kara Walker. The curatorial willingness to move beyond the status quo and fixed definitions of quality as well as to open conventional systems of value to new exchanges of meaning reflects why Jürgen Habermas said that “modernity is an unachieved project.” Or to put it a bit differently, modernity is a curatorial project to be, happily, reconsidered over and over again.
Since 1989, when his work was introduced to Western audiences in the landmark exhibition Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Huang Yong Ping has been a continuously critical and indispensable presence in contemporary art. He has shown work in most of the world’s major venues for contemporary art—the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Bienal, to which he was invited multiple times, as well as many other festivals and museums in Europe, Asia, and the United States. More important and impressive than his long list of exhibitions, however, is how Huang never fails to create visually charismatic projects, each specific to and consciously rooted in a given time, place, history, and context. Altogether, his work of the past two decades constitutes a powerfully hopeful vision of the synergy of specificity and universality.
The first exhibition to address the artist’s whole career, House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective examines an evolving and inventive artistic language that reflects global modernity without succumbing to trendy lingo. The period from the end of the 1980s, when the artist immigrated to France, to the present coincides with the waning of multiculturalism and a transition to the rhetoric of globalism. Despite the apparent seamlessness of this historical development and oft-touted notions of the “global village,” Huang reminds us that ethnically, culturally, and religiously motivated regional conflicts and enduring colonial legacies are very much part of the global picture. While some of us may have been naively optimistic not so long ago about the potential for healing and unity, we now realize that if globalization is an inevitable march that we are all part of, it proceeds only as a tumultuous and fractious process.
In that light, Huang’s iconic early work The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes (1987/1993), which the Walker acquired in 2001, testifies to the artist’s foresight and insight. The modest, literal gesture of mixing two systems of knowledge and aesthetics produced a mound of pulp, which was placed on a sheet of broken glass, which in turn sits on a packing crate to form the finished sculpture. The resulting object was a humorous and deeply felt encapsulation of a number of topics germane not only to our own times but also to the whole of human history—the pitfalls of linear historical thinking, the difficulties of cross-cultural translation, and the precarious position of various hierarchies of knowledge as well as, perhaps most poignantly, the human need to “clean up” the untidiness of the unknown. Huang’s work refers to current world events—such as the collision of an American spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet in April 2001—and ancient Chinese classics with equal ease and lack of hierarchy. The world that emerges from his mind and his hands is one in which history flows forward and backward and culture constantly redefines its perimeters.
Huang’s ingenious and profound philosophy of art and the world is also evident in his prolific writing, selected, translated, and published here for the first time. Grafting Marcel Duchamp and Zen Buddhism, avant-garde and I Ching in ways previously unimaginable, he effectively challenges our established ways of thinking about art and viewing the world. His writing, as well as this exhibition, will do no less than confirm that Huang is not merely a “Chinese artist” but a contemporary oracle who sees across the past, present, and future.
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