82 The EconomistNovember 9th 2019
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reepy crawlies intrigued him. Beetles, centipedes, cock-
roaches, crickets, geckos, toads and snakes. The way they de-
voured each other while at the same time providing sustenance for
their fellow creatures was symbolic of humans’ existence on
Earth, he felt, and he poured them into “Theatre of the World”, one
of his best-known works. Best of all were the snakes. Where the
River Loire empties into the Bay of Biscay in his adopted France,
you can see one of his colossal shimmering serpents emerge from
the water as the tide recedes; at times it looks like a sea snake, at
others an earthly reptile. He made one for the Shanghai Power Sta-
tion of Art, and another for a show in Queensland, Australia. Both
were skeletons of creatures big enough to have devoured others,
yet it was their own flesh that had withered to nothing. In 2016 he
made his biggest serpent yet, a 254-metre-long beast (pictured)
that coiled and roiled over islands of sea containers stacked
around the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris, its unhinged jaw open
so wide it looked as if it could swallow the world.
The chaos of power, the fragility of empires, the tottering pre-
cariousness of globalisation—devour or be devoured—these were
the themes he returned to again and again. Nothing was certain,
save for uncertainty. In the West the snake was temptation, sexu-
ality, the crusher of children. In China it represented good luck,prosperity and rebirth in its ability to shed its skin. As an artist, Mr
Huang loved its multiple symbolisms; as a philosopher, he found
himself drawn to its ambiguities. His artistic ideas were a fusion of
East and West, ever more so as he grew older.
And yet that connection might never have been formed had he
not been displaced himself. On May 18th 1989, the day the Chinese
government made the secret decision, implemented 48 hours lat-
er, to impose martial law and crush the protests in Beijing’s Tia-
nanmen Square, he was in Paris, 10,000km from his home town of
Xiamen. It was the same day that “Magiciens de la Terre” opened at
the Pompidou Centre. The original global contemporary-art show,
“Magiciens” showed Western artists for the first time alongside
artists from across the world, and changed art history forever. Mr
Huang was the first Chinese artist chosen to take part.
He had left China shortly before with little other than the skip-
ping rope he always carried in his pocket. After “Magiciens” he was
advised it would not be safe to go home, so he stayed on in France,
squatting in cheap artists’ studios, living on grants and residencies
offered by friendly curators and travelling on a laissez-passerfrom
the French foreign ministry. The seventh of eight children of a
middle-class family of tea merchants in Fujian who, like many
Chinese, lost their business when it was nationalised after the
Communists took control in 1949, and whose schooling was dis-
rupted by the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, he was used to be-
ing self-sufficient. He carried everything he needed in his head. He
had absorbed Zen Buddhism and Taoist cosmology and magic as
easily as he would later read Foucault and Wittgenstein; books
were the only thing he liked to spend money on.
He had learned early on about Duchamp and the Dadaist move-
ment through a few photocopied pages of a Taiwanese version of
Pierre Cabanne’s “Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp”, which con-
vinced him that art could not be detached from real life, but should
instead take a stand on everything. When he revolted against the
painting curriculum at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts and was
told to be a high-school teacher rather than an approved artist, he
founded Xiamen Dada, a revolutionary artists’ co-operative. In
1986 the group put on an exhibition of their recent work, some of
which, inspired by Duchamp, was made of objects they had found
in the street. At the end of the show, the group set their artworks on
fire, believing that only destruction would prove that it was the
ideas rather than the objects that were the real works of art.
Mr Huang was lucky to come of age just as the Chinese avant-
garde, known as the ’85 New Wave, was taking off. He was lucky too
to fetch up in France, where artists and artistic theories were part
of mainstream culture. In 1999 he represented France at the Venice
Biennale, and on the day it opened Catherine Trautmann, the cul-
ture minister, handed the artist his first French passport. Becom-
ing French cost him his Chinese citizenship and should logically
have made him persona non grata in China. Yet the opposite
proved true.
In 2000 he returned home for the first time in over a decade.
Where once his works were collected almost exclusively by West-
ern buyers such as François Pinault and Bernard Arnault, now he
was sought out by Chinese museums, including M+, which will
open in Hong Kong next year, and the Red Brick Art Museum on the
outskirts of Beijing. Like the serpents he loved making, he was able
to slip silently across frontiers, making works that were deeply po-
litical yet never dissident. For the 2000 Shanghai Biennial, he
created “Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank”, a 20-tonne replica of the Brit-
ish-designed former HSBCBank, which became a Communist gov-
ernment building after 1949 and in the 1990s was the headquarters
of the Pudong Development Bank. Made of sand, thinly laced with
cement, the work was designed to crumble away. In France it was
seen as a critique of dog-eat-dog capitalism; in China as a com-
ment on the weak heart of colonialism. He revelled in the ambigu-
ity, which is why when he died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage,
both France and China claimed him as their own. 7Huang Yong Ping, master of the Chinese avant-garde, died
on October 20th, aged 65Making art out of chaos
Obituary Huang Yong Ping