‘He Was an Immense Artist’: The Chinese Artist Huang Yong Ping, Who Fused the Spirit of Duchamp with Zen Buddhism, Has Died

The France-based, Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping, who was known
for weaving Chinese and Western historical canons together to
create provocative results, died suddenly on Saturday. The
pioneering member of the Chinese avant-garde was 65 years old.

Born in 1954 in Xiamen, China, Huang was a founding member of
the Xiamen Dada group. The collective first came to attention when
in 1986 they torched a number of the paintings they had recently
shown at the Xiamen People’s Art Museum. The radical act was
prompted by their dissatisfaction with the circumstances around the
show. The collective’s motto was “Zen is Dada, Dada is Zen,” and
Huang’s hero was Marcel Duchamp.

Over the following decades, Huang continued to fuse elements of
Zen Buddhism, Dadaism, and a Duchampian sense of irony to create
large-scale surrealistic installations and sculptures, some of
which fell foul of political censorship in China, while one
notorious work upset animal rights activists in North America.

“Huang Yong Ping was a giant of the avant-garde, a father figure
for generations of artists and thinkers,” the Paris-based art
dealer Kamel Mennour told artnet News. “He opened up the delicate
path of the dialogue between worlds with intact engagement and
philosophical view on the world’s turbulences,”  Mennour said,
adding, “He was an immense artist. He was my friend.” The dealer
began formally representing the artist a decade ago by which time
Huang was already settled in Paris.

The self-taught artist, who numbered Joseph Beuys, John Cage, as
well as Duchamp as inspirations, maintained a critical position and
cast a skeptical eye on a rapidly globalizing world, which his
career personified.

In 1987, he made what would become an iconic work, The
History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art
Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes, by destroying
art history books by Wang Bomin and Herbert Read in the
laundry. The artist placed the resulting pulp atop of piece of
broken glass on a Chinese teabox.

In 1989, Huang traveled to Paris to take part in
the groundbreaking Centre Pompidou exhibition “Magiciens de la
Terre.” He stayed in France, which he went on to represent at
the Venice Biennale in 1999. For his
prestigious Monumenta commission in 2016, he filled the Grand
Palais in Paris with a giant, serpentine sculpture and shipping
containers to create Empires. 

It would not be the last time his work, which often featured
animals, was pulled from a major exhibition. In 2018,
Huang’s Theater of the World was heavily
modified by the Guggenheim Museum after vehement protests from
animal rights activists.  A petition to take down the title
work and two other pieces from the group show “Art and China
After 1989” garnered half a million signatories within days.

In Huang’s work, caged snakes and lizards were meant to devour
insects, and probably each other, during the show. The Guggenheim
showed the artist’s sculptural cage without the animals.

In an interview with artnet
News’s editor-in-chief, Andrew Goldstein, Guggenheim director
Richard Armstrong described Huang as an artist “asking tough
questions, and that is brutal.” New York’s Gladstone Gallery, which
also represents the artist, put up a show of Huang’s
work following the museum’s decision.

Huang maintained that he was against provocation for its own
sake, asking: “How can an artwork be created just to be censored?”
His Theatre of the World was shown as the artist
intended at the Guggenheim Bilbao but only as an empty cage at
SFMOMA.

The post ‘He Was an Immense Artist’: The Chinese Artist
Huang Yong Ping, Who Fused the Spirit of Duchamp with Zen Buddhism,
Has Died appeared first on artnet News.