Huang yong pings theater of the world
Home / General Biography Information / Huang yong pings theater of the world
He was an icon in the art world because of the provocative, surreal, and animalistic works that he has made since the 1980s. A few years after his graduation, he formed Xiamen Dada56.
A few years after this, Huang migrated to France and has been living there ever since. The Bridge, an arching, serpentine cage, contains snakes and turtles crawling among scattered Chinese bronze sculptures of mythological animal forms.
Publicdelivery.org. This public pressure forced organizers to remove Yongping’s installation along with two other pieces from Guggenheim’s new exhibition of contemporary Chinese art, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World (Jiang Zhi, “christies.com”, 2017). (Jiang Zhi, “christies.com”, 2017)
.
The installation includes two main structures: first the arching metal frame that bridges over the second structure, a wooden four legged table with a transparent octagonal wire mesh cage on top of it (Jiang Zhi, “christies.com”, 2017).His opus can be categorized into four periods: anti-artistic affection, anti-self-expression, anti-art, and anti-history. (“publicdelivery.com”, 2022)https://www.christies.com/features/Art-and-China-after-1989-Theater-of-the-World-8579-1.aspx.
(“publicdelivery.com”, 2022)
In 1999, he was France’s trusted artist to represent the country in the Venice Biennale7. This led to international outrage as animal rights activists gathered over 800,000 signatures to remove the work, and were actively protesting before the works installation in New York threatening violent retaliation if installment was not halted (“publicdelivery.com”, 2022).
The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Huang’s installation is also inspired by the mythological creature and Daoist deity Xuanwu, a hybrid animal with the head and tail of a snake and the body of a tortoise—symbolically the most potent pair in Chinese cosmology, whose union, according to some tales, created the universe. Beneath it, live reptiles dart among hundreds of insects inside the tortoise-like structure called Theater of the World.
Huang’s design refers to the panopticon, an eighteenth-century prison concept by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham that enabled constant surveillance from a single central point, and that was later taken up by Michel Foucault in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish as a metaphor for how modern societies control their subjects.
Through his work Huang was attempting to highlight humanity’s natural propensity to turn to violence, especially during this time period where the world is feeling the aftermath of the World Wars, and the Cold War (Jiang Zhi, “christies.com”, 2017). https://www.guggenheim.org/audio/track/theater-of-the-world-and-the-bridge-by-huang-yong-ping.
Naturally housing all of these different species together led to some of them eating one another.