DSL Collection

Huang Yong Ping was born on the peninsula of the city of Xiamen, in Fujian province, in the south-east of China. After the Cultural revolution, this artist was admitted to the Zhejiang academy of  Fine arts where he went beyond the framework of the teaching very quickly. He became acquainted with French structuralist thought as well as with the philosopher Wittgenstein's ideas and with artists which created true ruptures in art, namely Marcel Duchamps, John Cage, Joseph Beuys. He published texts that already announced his desire to put in relation Western Postmoderne thought with this of the void and the fullness of Daoism.Back to his hometown in 1982, he thus quickly became one of the most radical and militant artist of the avant-gardist movement in China. He did many actions against socialist realism and academicism: he created mechanisms by which the work is ordered by chance. From the yi-king (Book of the Transformations, a classic of Chinese divination), he realized works using all sorts of objects. He burnt all his paintings without neither being able to decide nor to control the result of his work. He asked the artists of the Xiamen Dada group ¡ª of which he was the leader ¡ª to do the same (1987). In the country where he grew up, both leaden by the injustice of the goulag and by great tides of social and economic planning, the dynamics proposed by the artist is in part based on the irrationality that dictates its artistic solution. 
 
The Buddha's Hands
 
Thus, the drawing of his big roulette gave him a solution: to put a history book of the modern western art and a history book of the traditional Chinese art in a washing machine  for two minutes. Then draw one of these two cultures from it. 
 
Washing the notion of culture, all the while indicating the relativity of the cultural value had thus become  Huang Yong Ping's main motivation for several years(1).  He arrived in France in 1989, invited by Jean- Hubert Martin for the exhibition Magicians of the Earth(2) . That event took place at the same time as happened the events in Tiananmen Square. He thus decided not to go back to China anymore. Then he went on resisting by renewing his strategies, by drawing in Chinese culture in order to fight for the voice of the Other. This one was often either marginalized or transcended by the cultural mono speeches dominated by the West.
 
Huang Yong Ping more often than not associates either more than thousand years old Chinese divination systems or Western ones according to strategies which put into question the legitimacy of the eurocentric role of the intellectual and daily life. As the art critic Fei Dawei(3)expresses it, the artist chooses "a double-edged attitude intended to cause cultural shocks and to overcome at the same time the oppositions between the cultures, with this constant motivation to seek the otherness beyond the dead end of the cultural dilemma in which we live".
 
Through his protean work, the artist projects the reality of his existence of citizen of the world who lives and works in several cultures simultaneously around fundamental issues relating to immigration, the identity and hybridity. These issues are raised through the works realised for this exhibition entitled The Buddha 's Hands. The historical and spiritual set of problems that the works of the artist imply are always related to the contexts in which they are shown. According to the places where he is brought to work, Huang Yong Ping uses most of the time materials unusual in the contemporary artistic practice such as cooked rice(4), medicines(5), or dead and alive animals and insects: snakes, turtles, scorpions, lizards etc ¡­(6) The use of animals by the artist is justified by his knowledge of the Chinese books in which philosophy works by metaphor: "In China, there is a more intense relationship with nature, dirtiness and poverty bringing closer all kinds of things. If there are dislike and fear of these two, there is also attraction. There, division between things is less strict there than in the West. All the interest lies in the chance, in what is written out of the will of the human beings. Our life cannot escape social elements: when one looks at animals in a zoo, they are isolated, protected from one another. There is not this need between the various cultures, since it is today impossible that these one remain isolated and protected the ones from the others. Each one sings with his own voice and could create dissensions or break the harmony." (7)
 
Huang Yong Ping was often confronted with the problem of censorship(8) : on several occasions when the artist introduced alive animals and insects into his work as a metaphor of the various cultural ethnic groups. This report shows the limits of the institution, so that when the plan works, as in the galerie des Cinq Continents in the Mus¨¦e d'Art Africain et d'Oc¨¦aniens where true animals were put on the same level as Chinese antiquities(9) , the implacable logic of the food chain thus comes out more reinforced.
 
This exhibition entitled The Buddha's Hands puts us in the presence of multiples levels of both the cultural and spiritual crossroads on which Huang Yong Ping has been working for about twenty years. The Buddha's Hand is a medicinal plant used for its therapeutic virtues of longevity. Put on the ground, its gigantic form reminds of the Buddha's hand keeping an exaggeratedly oversized rosary. The monumentality of the piece amplifies the metaphor of the power of religion on the man in a caricatured manner. Here reigns an apparent peace (or danger) which will be found again in the other hand with its many fingers suspended in the gallery's space, like the articulated tentacles of an octopus in full action. This suspended hand has a strong choreographic presence in the space, while its willowy forms associate to our unconscious the shared feelings of fascination and fear beyond any cultural reference.
 
Huang Yong Ping transforms the symbols beyond their significations, as if  half accompanying us in our understanding, while leaving us entirely free so that we appropriate his work according to our own rhythm and criteria for comprehension. The artist maintains a very great ability of both analysing Eastern and Western history. It is thus by the knowledge of Wittgenstein's principles that the artist determines our reading in an always unforeseeable and moving sphere of activities in which any negotiation is always possible by means of the very nature of cultural and spiritual data which he borrows in his plastic language.
 
In the capacity to adapt to the infinite possibilities of interpretation given by the different art histories , Huang Yong Ping chose to make a very well-known picture by the Garden of Delights of l'Besse? of the Mount St Odile, Herad of Hohenburg (1167-1195) in wood and  in a monumental manner. This picture both contains texts and 336 representations of the power of both sciences and theology. Huang Yong Ping chose one of the most famous among them , this of the L¨¦viathan, which he entitled Fishing. The symbolic picture of the L¨¦viathan taken in the agrarian myths took an infinitely bigger dimension in history and psychology.
 
This is maybe the reason why the artist oversized the proportions of this drawing till realizing a monumental work which technique is almost similar to this of the traditional religious sculpture. It was realized by craftsmen that make Buddhas, explains the artist with a certain pleasure. He also says "that the Christ on the cross is certainly less well realized than the Buddhas". The L¨¦viathan is a monster in the Phoenician mythology. The popular imagination could always fear that it would wake up, attracted by an effective malediction against the existing order. It is still in the sea, where it rests somnolent if one does not annoy it. This sea monster of the origins, mentioned in Job, was already mentioned in the Babylonian cosmogonies. If one admits that the sea is also the symbol of the unconscious, receptacle of obscure monsters and instinctive forces, this monster is able to swallow up the sun that itself symbolizes God. In the treaties of political philosophy, the L¨¦viathan symbolizes the state that appropriates itself an absolute sovereignty, rival of God's one, as well as an absolute right of life and death on all creatures. Similarly to an uncontrolled and pitiless Monster the state acts according to an arbitrary tyranny that is to say in a both  cruel and totalitarian manner to dominate the bodies and the consciences. This absolutist conception of the political state derives from Thomas Hobbes, as a logical consequence, of a materialist philosophy, that claims to protect individuals and groups but at the cost of all freedom and a passive obedience to power.
 
The chief attraction of this exhibition therefore rightly lies in the representation of the power in which makeshift Buddhas are represented here in place of the Apostles, Christ has become the hook. If as the artist says 'the power in Buddhism does not exist in itself', what he wished to show is the idea of the illusion of  power and the vanity of representation.
 
Nothing is hidden in the end: the vanity is revealed at the end of the exhibition. Sheep's paws and tails are suspended in the window of the gallery whereas the shop counter shows a roll kept opened horizontally by two freshly cut paws. For the anecdote, the artist and his wife gave the opportunity to people to kill the sheep for the Aid feast in their workshop. The own remains of this sacrifice have thus been kept by the artist who wished that'' these elements be left to dry in the gallery by the look of the visitors from the exterior and the interior". The artist discloses some elements of his personal biography. As Philippe Vergne emphasizes in the catalogue of the last monographic exhibition of the artist :  this is because Huang Yong Ping's strategy consists in systematically choosing at least two cultural universes as far apart  from one another as possible. He thus develops a method that consists in making coexisting these two conflicting entities but that at the same time cannot exist without each other''(10). Sheep or Deers thus recreates different drawn skeletons of these cervid, which tracks are revealed by red ink(11) applied on the roll so as to give free rein to our imagination and enable us to imagine as the artist says,  ''that the cut paws may have unexpectedly come to walk on the rice paper roll.''
 
The List of Offerings
          
If Tibetan buddhism keeps the oldest aspects of traditional buddhism these days, this worship is more linked with the animal world, by means of reproduced elements here such as the bell, the snake, the elephant skin, a ritual object, and predatory birds that hold the bloodied Buddha's hands in their beak. The bat is the symbol of happiness in the Far East, its presence, like the Buddha's hand, also accompanies the character for longevity(12) . Its head being overdeveloped, the weight of its brain forces it to perch with the head suspended beneath...
 
This bird embodies obscure aspects:  cruelty, slyness, oddness. It also has already identified erotic and libidinous powers that the artist  therefore considers as close to these of the human being. Huang Yong Ping worked on several projects around the bat, this furtive animal. He thus reused the characteristics of this animal according to a genuine work in progress which destiny took as much the taxidermic form as that of drawing and diplomatic intrigues between the three countries that structure the artist's identity: China, France and the United States(13) .
 
The bat introduces the content of the roll on the branch in offering to the visitor. This mysterious work displayed in the space is filled with drawn clues that refer as much to the tower pagoda revered by Buddhist believers as to the rituals associated with this worship. The deciphering of the drawn tower pagoda reveals the axis thanks to the transparency of the rice paper: a mandala-shaped construction, similar to a vertebral column, made of  void and fullness which refers to our own link with the world.
 
This vertical roll, The list of offerings introduces and greets  the spectator in his journey in the gallery's space , like the unfolded of a legend of which one will never know if that was  the bat that ate the Buddha's Hands or if they offered themselves or were sacrificed¡­
 
                                               Saint-Ouen, Nov. 2006
 

Many elements of this text come from the fruitful discussions with the artist, his wife, Shen Yuan, Hou  Hanru, Fei Dawei, Yu Hsiao-Hwei and Evelyne Jouanno who wrote her MA thesis about the artist in september 1998 and from which I took many elements.
                                                                                                                       
(1) The art critic Evelyne Jouanno emphasizes in her MA thesis that : ? washing (or dirtying) culture will precisely enable to counter the cultural and hegemonical discourses and their powers in the West . He bandaged with pulp the wounds of an uprooted tree coming from books and newspapers at the  Fondation Cartier in 1990. Huang Yong Ping would  also wash all the books of one section of the Library of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg in 1991 and reduce to vomit twenty or so translations of the famous book by  Beuys, Kounellis, Cucchi and Kiefer, Let's Build a Cathedrale at the  Fenster Gallery in Frankfurt,  thus putting into question here the political power played by the super stars of the world of art. He also reduced to pulp a stock of art books from the biblioth¨¨que Forney in 1992. The matter here was to reinforce his strategy of alternative to the discourses of art . ?
 
(2) I met  Huang Yong Ping during the setting up of this exhibition.
 
(3) Fei Dawei, Press release of the exhibition P¨¦ril de Mouton, Fondation Cartier, Paris, 1997.
 
(4) Indigestible Object, Museo d'Arte Contemporaneo, Prato, Italy, 1992
 
(5) Pharmacie, Galerie Froment & Putman, Paris, 1995
 
(6) Huang Yong Ping first brought in alive animals in his work in 1993, especially in his work entitled Passage within the framework of Coalition, organised at the  Center for Contemporary Art, Glasgow.
 
(7) Catalogue of the exhibition Huang Yong Ping at la Galerie des Cinq Continents, Mus¨¦e National des Arts d'Afrique et d'Oc¨¦anie, Paris, 21 sept. 1995 to 15 jan. 1996, p.18
 
(8) Yellow Peril  at  the Oxford Museum in 1993 and Le Th¨¦atre du Monde at the  Georges Pompidou Center in 1994, just to mention a few examples.
 
(9) House of Oracles : a Huang Yong Ping R¨¦trospective, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota et Mass Moca, North Adams, Massachusetts, 2005-07, edited by Philippe Vergne and Doryun Chong, with the  contributions of Fei Dawei, Hou Hanru and Huang Yong Ping, the  texts were translated by Yu Hsiao Hwei.
 
(10) House of Oracles : a Huang Yong Ping R¨¦trospective, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota et Mass Moca, North Adams, Massachusetts, 2005-07, edited by Philippe Vergne and Doryun Chong, with the  contributions of Fei Dawei, Hou Hanru and Huang Yong Ping, the  texts were translated by Yu Hsiao Hwei.
 
(11) It is a blend a clay and pigment, used especially for the Chinese seal.
 
(12) Bats were nailed on the doors of the barns in our countrysides. However they were glorified in other regions of the world. They were present in the religion of many civilisations in Central America and certain people venerated them such as the Mayas. The bat became a symbol of good luck and longetivity in China under the Ming dynasty (1360-1644 av. J.C.). Pi hen fu is nowadays the word the most in use to refer to it and it means ?flat insect of the happiness ?.
 
(13) See catalogue Bat Project 1 & II, edited by the Fondation Guy & Myriam Ullens, 2003. The Bat Project started in  Shenzhen in dec 2001 ; together with the Bat Project II  (Guangzhou Biennale in 2002), they are both attempts at replicating the american spy plane EP-3. This latter collided in the Chinese airspace in 2001. What caught the artist's attention  as  the art historian Martina K?ppel-Yang underlines in the catalogue of the exhibition is that, ? the American services dismantled that plane under the amused eye of the Chinese. This ironical situation caught the artist's attention. He thus created a scale one Batplane. The artist  thus perfectly reused that project for almost five years and especially on the occasion of his participation at the Venice Biennale where he was invited by the  curator Hou Hanru to take part to the exhibition  Z.O.U, Zone of Urgency ? in 2003.