英语角 angle

Philip Tinari on Huang Yong Ping in Beijing

2008.03.26

Installation view, Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank, 2000/2008

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, 2008

For those of us who have grown tired of the recent Cai vs. Ai polarity—played out in response to their recent Guggenheim and Mary Boone openings back in New York, and to their supposed respective support and disdain for the Olympics, and by extension, the government—this was indeed a sunny weekend in Beijing. On Thursday the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, the one art institution in China to garner as much media attention as either Cai or Ai, opened a retrospective of Huang Yong Ping’s entire career under the title House of Oracles. It was the fourth opening for the show, and a lot has changed since I flew to Minneapolis one October weekend in 2005, just as the auction frenzy was about to begin, to see the initial version break in Herzog and de Meuron’s then-new Walker.

The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes, 1987/1993

For Beijing it was the rare exhibition that actually provided something art-related for the art world here to talk about. At dinner tables and on Internet discussion boards the last few nights, talk has shifted from which of Beijing’s high-end malls is selling at 80% discount to what a new generation is supposed to make of a very powerful batch of work from the mid-1980s and onward. Some contend that Huang’s oeuvre rests too heavily on the idea of its own eventual presence in a museum; others contend that it tackles too-obvious themes (cultural clash, Daoism, Dada) using too-roundabout strategies; still others find the palette too monochromatic, too far skewed in the direction of archival yellows and woody browns. And still, a few days before Huang’s alma mater in Hangzhou marks its 80th anniversary with a bumper crop of young exhibitions to offset (or complement?) the pomp and circumstance of the official celebrations, there is the sense that this is a batch of work that needs to be contended with. In a curious twist of fate, the exhibition has provided young artists here with a first chance to see in the flesh works they had previously known only from catalogues. This is curious because so much of Huang’s early work is about the problem of his own catalogue-mediated encounter with the Western canon—take the 1984 oil Mona-Vinci in which Leonardo’s muse and self-portrait appear on the same plane, just as they did to the young Huang looking at a shoddy textbook in which those two works were printed on opposite faces of the same thin page.

Mona-Vinci, 1986-1987

Of course the idea that there is anything to be feared in encountering the West, the idea that underlies Huang works from the canonical 1987 pile of pulp resulting from mixing a Chinese and Western art history in a washing machine for two minutes to the 2004 Pole of the East in which an eagle sits atop a silver signpost pointing to Eastern countries listed in the order of their likely invasion by the U.S., has little staying power with Chinese artists in 2008. And while this confidence ignores the actual poignancy with which this encounter was approached (and lived) until very recently, it marks an arrival that, long anticipated, has finally come to pass. In 2005 it seemed just a little bit salvific to note that Huang’s Bat Project—a three-part life-size sculpture of the U.S. Navy spyplane downed over Hainan at the dawn of the Bush administration—could be exhibited in Minneapolis after three successive censures in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Beijing. In 2008 that same work is on view in the heart of Beijing’s 798 gallery district, its own vehement politics now part of the same bygone history that began with the pulp heap.

Installation view, Bat Project IV, 2005

Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, 2008

In The Wise Man Learns from the Spider How to Spin a Web, which Huang realized in 1994 for an exhibition in Rouen honoring Duchamp, a tarantula in a cage shaped like the master’s hat rack casts a shadow over a table strewn with photocopies of the Taiwanese edition of Conversations with Duchamp through which the artist first encountered one of his greatest influences. The shadow cast by the spider only ever partially obscures the text, which Huang explained as a “a kind of ‘fragmentation’ I consider to be more reliable than ‘completeness.’” Unlike Cai’s cosmological alchemy and its desire toward belief, or Ai’s coy shrug as the Han-dynasty urn shatters upon the gray brick floor, Huang’s work is at once about a desire to understand and a resignation to the futility of the epistemological project. “I always benefit,” he once noted, “from all sorts of ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘distortions.’” Not a final solution, nor a pretense to one, Huang’s embrace of the impossibility of interpretation seems a nice posture for an overdetermined city in an overdetermined year.