Huang Yongping

Executed in 2006

Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris
Private Collection, New York

Paris, Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Les mains de Bouddha, March 1-April 22, 2006, pp. 20-24, illustrated in colour

This work is in generally good condition. The paper along the edges of the wings are slightly worn and there are minor scattered tears but it seems inherent to the medium and working method of the artist. There are scattered holes throughout the scroll due to the placement of the scroll in the bat's mouth. The largest hole measures approx. 7-8 cm. The eyes and mouth of the bat seems scratched and worn, which is inherent to the medium and working method of the artist.
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This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.

Huang Yong Ping's art is based on layers of references to elements from Chinese tradition, Western art history, and the artist's own past creations, evoked in unlikely combinations of objects and images. Huang has never taken the process of object- and image-making as absolute: his earliest work during his days at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts and immediately after his graduation in the early 1980s involved paintings created by the chance instructions of a roulette wheel, group exhibitions with his "Xiamen Dada" collective in which sculptures were burned and trash was placed inside the museum, and a pile of the wet pulp of a Chinese and a Western art history book washed in a washing machine.

When Huang Yong Ping emigrated to Paris in 1989 - a trip he undertook not for directly political reasons, but instead to participate in the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou - his work took a cultural turn. Throughout the 1990s, he continued to examine the very real histories of colonialism and imperialism, and to link them to current historical developments then being touted as globalization. In the early part of this decade, he began to return to his native China to produce and display work, ever conscious of how the power dynamics of the world were in constant flux.

This work, The List of Offerings, is best read as a philosophical post-script to what was perhaps Huang's biggest project of this decade, the Bat Project (2001-05). The story of the Bat Project is well known inside and beyond the Chinese art world: Huang set out to create a replica of the U.S. spy plane that had crashed into a Chinese fighter jet and then made an emergency landing on Hainan Island in April 2001. The first part of the sculpture was censored before its planned exhibition in Shenzhen, shortly after the attacks of September 11. The second was removed from the plaza in front of the Guangdong Museum of Art just before the opening of the First Guangzhou Triennial there in November 2002, an event that otherwise marked the official system's acceptance for "experimental art." The third part was to be shown at an exhibition funded by a real-estate developer in Beijing, but canceled yet again. The name "Bat Project" was taken from the nickname the U.S. Navy uses for the EP-3 plane, but also references the bat's status as a fly-by-night, somewhat scary animal in English, as well as the Chinese word for bat, bianfu, the second character of which is a homophone with "fortune".

In 2005, Huang mounted a major mid-career retrospective, House of Oracles, at the Walker Art Center. One centerpiece of that exhibition was Bat Project IV, the first fully realized version of the project, which featured hundreds of miniature taxidermied bats from his home province of Fujian inside a full-scale airplane fuselage made of bamboo and the sort of red-white-and-blue burlap one finds on Chinese construction sites. This is the immediate context for The List of Offerings, which was realized for the artist's solo show at Anne de Villepoix, The Hands of the Buddha, which opened in Paris just days before the second installment of House of Oracles opened at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. It was specifically for House of Oracles that Huang began to work again with Chinese scrolls, painting on them in watercolors. An "index painting" famously mapped out his retrospective, in which he included small images of most of the works included, providing a "key" to his work in the spirit of Duchamp's earlier valises which contained tiny replicas of his sculptures.

This work, and the entire exhibition Les mains de Boudha, explores these themes and motifs which had become so important to Huang in preparing his retrospective. This giant bat hung upside-down from the ceiling at the gallery entrance, its wings spread and back to the viewers, a scroll dangling from its mouth. The scroll contains a matrix of animal and religious images contained by what seem to be architectural elements. A bear hide, a curling snake, a mollusk shell, some sheep pierced by arrows, several sticks of incense. At the bottom of the scroll, birds alight with human body parts in their mouths. A model of what appears to be a human heart acts as a weight, anchoring the scroll to the ground. The architectural components could be segments of a pagoda, but they might also be the segments into which the plane at the center of the Bat Project was cut before it was flown away in the back of a Russian cargo plane.

The List of Offerings also refers to the artist's frequent use of live animals in his work, a practice that has excited bitter opposition from animal-rights advocates as far back as the early 1990s. For Huang, animals are the ultimate symbols, their agency and autonomy allowing them to play out dramas in ways unintelligible to human logic. In this way they enact the Daoist mysticism he remains so fascinated by. The List of Offerings is in this sense a self-consicously iconic work, combining and cross-referencing the artist's many interests at the specific moment in time at which it was created.