Power and spectacle on display in Vancouver's Huang retrospective

Last Updated: Friday, April 6, 2007 | 4:51 PM ET

CBC Arts

The Vancouver Art Gallery has opened its retrospective of Huang Yong Ping, a Chinese artist who helped pave the way for a new generation of avant-garde artists in his home country.

Huang Yong Ping, photographed in 2005, has inspired a new generation of Chinese artists to make bold statements.
(Vancouver Art Gallery)

Huang, a Chinese-born, Paris-based artist, is hailed as a voice that crosses cultural boundaries and tackles difficult political ideas.

But the Vancouver retrospective that opened Thursday and is titled House of Oracles also shows that he delivers spectacle on a grand scale.

The 100-foot (30.5-metre) wooden snake skeleton that winds through the second floor of the gallery is already a hit with visitors, co-ordinating curator Daina Augaitis said in an interview with CBC Arts Online.

Called Theatre of the World, the sculpture hinges on giant turtle that interacts with the snake in the middle of exhibit, a meditation on world power that draws on both Western and Eastern myths: the turtle with the world on its back, the snake and turtle together meaning a garden of the north.

"A lot of his work deals with the dynamics of power," Augaitis said.

Asked to pick a door

That is evident by the entry doors, which ask gallery-goers to choose a door marked "Nationals" or "Others" as if they were going through immigration at an airport.

Either choice takes them by a lion's cage strewn with the remains of earlier meals, references to interrogation and scrutiny, particularly the scrutiny turned on foreigners.

The Nightmare of George V: Animals are a frequent theme, along with censorship, individuality and the role of chance.
(Vancouver Art Gallery)

Huang continues the theme of animals — and the gigantic scale — with the sculpture called The Nightmare of George V, which shows a tiger on an elephant's back.

The exhibit, curated by the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, takes up the entire second floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Huang is one of the most varied and inventive sculptors today, and has paved the way for a new generation of artists to make bolder artistic statements.

Huang, now 52, began his journey as an artist in Xiamen, China, where he formed Xiamen Dada in the 1980s, a group interested in the absurd, the work of Marcel Duchamp and Dada, and the role of chance.

Their reflections on the institutions that promote art included burning their work in public and attaching sculptures to the outside of art galleries, activities that weren't well accepted in China.

He first came to attention in the West when he was invited to Paris to take part in the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la terre at the Musée National d'Art Moderne.

The scale and ingenuity of his work earned him numerous international invitations and he was soon living and working in Paris.

He was invited back to Shanghai in 2000 to take part in a show, but the work he created, Bat Project 2, was so controversial that it was shut down.

Bat Project 2 is the full-size cockpit of an American spy plane, filled with bats. Huang "likes to keep alive a powerful moment."
(Vancouver Art Gallery)

Bat Project 2, which is part of the House of Oracles retrospective, is a full-scale model of the cockpit section and left wing of an American EP-3 spy plane, filled with preserved bats.

'Keep alive a powerful moment'

The plane is a model of one that collided with a Chinese fighter jet in March 2001, killing the Chinese pilot and creating a major diplomatic incident, but bats, in China, are a symbol of longevity.

"He likes to keep alive a powerful moment," Augaitis said. "It's a reaction to the collective amnesia we all have to these events."

When Huang wanted to comment on the cross-over between art from the West and art from China, he put a book on Western art and a book on Chinese art together in a washing machine. He ended up with a grey pulp.

"The work is deadly serious, but also humorous," Augaitis said. "He's really poking fun at these canonical texts."

It took four years to bring together all of Huang's works, as some had been left behind in China and some had been destroyed, and the exhibit opened in Minneapolis in October 2005 before going on to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and finally to Vancouver.

"It's perfect for Vancouver," she said. "We see ourselves as the gateway to Asia, and the place to talk about Western and Eastern influences together."

House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective is at the Vancouver Art Gallery until Sept. 16.