Huang Yong Ping

Huáng Yǒng Pīng (February 18, 1954 – October 20, 2019) was a Chinese-French contemporary artist and one of the most well known Chinese avant-garde artists of his time.

Born in Xiamen, he was recognized as the most controversial and provocative artist of the Chinese art scene of the 1980s.

Huang was one of the earliest contemporary Chinese artists to consider art as strategy.

As a self-taught student, some of his earliest artistic inspirations came from Joseph Beuys, John Cage, and Marcel Duchamp.

He later graduated from art school in Hangzhou in 1982, and formed Xiamen Dada (廈門達達) in 1986.

Huang's oeuvre can be characterized by four periods: anti-artistic affectation (fan jiaoshi zhuyi), anti-self-expression (fan ziwo biaoxian he xingshi zhuyi), anti-art (fan yishu), and anti-history (fanyishushi).

Roulette-Series is a three series project from 1985–1988 including portable roulettes consisting of six turntables.

In this piece, Huang focused on chance, divination, and a non-subjective way of creating his art works.

His finished abstract works were determined either by dice, a roulette wheel and other apparatuses that help create his pieces by chance or accident.

This process determined anything from the color to the juxtaposition of each element.

His theory is that one cannot escape destiny, and that destiny itself is not separate from accident or chance.

Huang's artworks tend to diverge from their original ideas, as "his method always involve a deferring process," and this series is very much so a product of those ideas.

As a stage in his anti-self-expression phase, Huang let external forces influence his artwork and determine the final product based on the outcomes of inanimate objects, such as the roulette wheel or dice.

Marcel Duchamp was a big influence on these pieces, as Huang not only eliminated the aesthetic taste and added spontaneity, but also created the portable roulettes as did Duchamp.

He also looked Wittgenstein's theory on ontology and representation.

Huang categorized it in three ways, as a process of art saying "work of art is bigger than the thought", conceptual art saying "the thought is bigger than the work of art" which is contradicting the first statement and then the last way to categorize it is the "Eastern Spirit" the Taoist and Chan Buddhist concept.

The way Huang went about creating his paintings were done in a specific order.

The canvas he was working on was divided into eight sections, which corresponded to a turntable that also had eight sections.

He determined what materials to use by rolling a dice, and the juxtaposition of the pieces were determined by the tables.

Huang said,

“every rule indicates an anti-rule, every motive indicates a kind of anti-motive, every choice indicates a kind of anti-choice.

He therefore believes: ‘However much art there is so much anti-art exists’ ”.

A Concise History of Modern Art after Two Minutes in the Washing Machine is a simple project with a complex idea.

It takes two famous textbooks on Chinese art, one by the Chinese art historian Wang Bomin and the other by the English art historian Herbert Read, and puts them in a washing machine for two minutes.

The finish product is a pile of pulp displayed on a wooden box.

Huang sought to essentially erase the clash between tradition and modernity, historically represented by the East and West respectively.

The pulp represents breaking the division between these to contradictory themes of traditional and modern art.

Xiamen Dada was a group formed by Huang Yong Ping with Zha Lixiong, Liu Yiling, Lin Chun and Jiao Yaoming in 1986, as a postmodernist, radical avant-garde group.

However, their works were often perceived as modern.

The group publicly burned their works in protest, and Huang stated, “Artwork to artist is like opium to men.

Until art is destroyed, life is never peaceful.” The group later withheld from any other public showings.

Huang was represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York, Kamel Mennour in Paris, and Tang Contemporary in Beijing.

At the age of 35 in 1989, Huang traveled to Paris to partake in the seminal exhibition Magiciens de la terre.

He later immigrated to France and lived there ever since.

As many of his pieces are very large, they are not suitable for auction.

In 1999, Huang represented France in the Venice Biennale.

In 2016, his piece "Empires" was selected for the Monumenta biennial exposition at the Grand Palais in Paris.

He died of illness in Paris at the age of 65 on 20th October, 2019.

Huang incorporated many different Chinese philosophies into his works, like Chan Buddhism, Taoism, some western philosophies and Dada, which led to the formation of the Xiamen Dada group.

There are many similarities between Chan Buddhism and Dada as the common phrase suggests, “Chan is Dada, Dada is Chan." Both Chan and Dada are direct and reflective about aesthetic importance and the impossible reality of reality. However, Chan Buddhism and Taoism are constantly changing, and since Dada is Chan and vice versa, this should be the case for Dada. However, they are opposed to adding more movements making it a paradox and essential having this idea work against Dada's main ideas. The use of these philosophies are an example of “cross-cultural exchange” and manifest in many of his works such as “A Concise History of Modern Art” after Two Minutes in the Washing Machine and A “Book Washing” Project.