艺术家 黄永砯
ARTIST
Huang Yong Ping
(Chinese/French, 1954–2019)
HUANG YONG PING EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
huang yong ping suspends sculptural sea monster from qatar museums gallery ceiling
The exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum October 6, 2017–January 7, 2018, presents work by 71 Chinese contemporary artists. Bracketed by the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, it surveys the culture of artistic experimentation during a time characterized by the onset of globalization and the rise of a newly powerful China on the world stage.
These tracks feature insights from exhibition lead curator Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art, and Senior Advisor, Global Arts, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Guest cocurator Philip Tinari narrates, and Curatorial Assistant Xiaorui Zhu-Nowell reads quotations from featured artists and critics.
Transcript
Narrator: Like several of the artists in this exhibition, Huang Yong Ping has lived and worked abroad for most of his career. He made waves as a young artist in China during the 1980s, then settled in Paris in 1989. Huang’s outsider stance has given him a particular perspective on the problems of Western modernism and the seismic cultural changes brought on by globalization.
These two interrelated installations, Theater of the World and The Bridge, are a metaphor for contemporary society as he saw it. Curator Alexandra Munroe:
Alexandra Munroe: Theater of the World is a roughly octagonal structure that conjures the panopticon, an 18th century building designed by the English social theorist Jeremy Bentham as a model of surveillance.
Narrator: The roof of this “theater” resembles a tortoise shell, while the companion work that arches over it, The Bridge, recalls a snake. Together they evoke Xuanwu, a mythological deity with the head and tail of a snake and the body of a tortoise. In Daoist cosmology, the potent union of these two creatures is said to have created the universe. Huang draws freely from such sources to offer a new hybrid system of art and thought.
Alexandra Munroe: As much as we might be driven to criticism and even outrage at the changes sweeping across the world, we have to also—the artist is asking us—accept them as a state of permanent flux and regeneration and change.
Narrator: It is from the 1993 work that the Guggenheim exhibition takes its title.
Alexandra Munroe: We are showing artists who are responding at once to China, but they’re responding also to the conditions of the world. Their art is a theater of the world.
Narrator: Writing about his work, artist Huang Yong Ping poses a series of questions:
Xiaorui Zhu-Nowell: “Is the Theater of the World an insect zoo? A test site where various species of the natural world devour one another? A space for observing the activity of ‘insects’? An architectural form as a closed system? A cross between a panopticon and the shamanistic practice of keeping insects? A metaphor for the conflict among different peoples and cultures? Or, rather, a modern representation of the ancient Chinese character gu, [or] chaos?”
我希望每件作品都保留着它第一次展出的样子，这些作品显然已经被展出过多次，它的生命力还不是它和不同邻近的其他作品的关系，或展览不同空间、不同语境的关系，它不是简单地按图施工，从一个地方搬到另一地方；就像第一次展出必然是从“争执”中产生，每一次重新展出是从不同争执中重新获得活力。
海怪 · Sea monster
艺术羊特征 · Art-Sheep Features
PART 1
LIKE A SURREAL NOAH’S ARK, HOANG YONG PING’S ART EMBODIES HISTORY, MYTHOLOGY, UTOPIA, RELIGION, SUPERSTITION AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY TIMES.
《海蛇（Serpent d’Océan）》位于卢瓦尔河岸边，法国南特郊外的比斯开湾，是艺术家黄永砯（1954-2019）2012年为Estuaire公共艺术节创作的巨型铝制永久艺术装置。弯曲的骨架长近130米(425英尺)，蛇形的曲线暗合附近圣纳泽尔桥的曲线，根据天气条件、潮汐和参观者身处的位置，这条海蛇骨架给人以多变、奇幻和不安的震撼。
Found at Sothebys, New York Contemporary Art Day Auction, Lot 527
