Voices of Oracles: The Exhibition Catalogue


		Image: House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective , 2005

As an exhibition, House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective is historic: the first retrospective of an artist who is well known outside the United States for creating art that offers endless alternatives to confining classifications such as East and West, tradition and modernity. But it’s also noteworthy because its catalogue, a 208-page, two-volume book (excerpted below and reproduced in part on this Web site), brings together influential voices in contemporary art, including Paris-based curator/critic Hou Hanru (perhaps the foremost scholar on contemporary art in China), Walker deputy director and chief curator Philippe Vergne, critic/curator Fei Dawei, and Huang Yong Ping himself, as well as a conceptual travel guide by assistant curator Doryun Chong. It also presents some of Huang’s writings in English for the first time.

Huang’s iconic early work The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes (1987/1993), which the Walker acquired in 2001, testifies to the artist’s foresight and insight. The modest, literal gesture of mixing two systems of knowledge and aesthetics produced a mound of pulp, which was placed on a sheet of broken glass, which in turn sits on a packing crate to form the finished sculpture. The resulting object was a humorous and deeply felt encapsulation of a number of topics germane not only to our own times but also to the whole of human history—the pitfalls of linear historical thinking, the difficulties of crosscultural translation, and the precarious position of various hierarchies of knowledge as well as, perhaps most poignantly, the human need to “clean up” the untidiness of the unknown.
--–Excerpt from Foreword, House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective

Huang Yong Ping’s installation Passage (1993) is a direct result of his own experiences as a non-Westerner traveling across Western borders. At every passport control point in Europe, in what appears to be a naked form of discrimination, one has to choose between a line marked “EC Nationals” and a line marked “Others.” Huang Yong Ping, naturally, had to take the queue for “Others,” which regularly resulted in more intensive questioning by customs officials. Proposing that the European public have the opportunity to share such an “exceptional” experience, he installed signs reading “EC Nationals” and “Others,” which were exact replicas of the signs at the Glasgow Airport, above both entrances to the galleries, each of which was blocked by a large animal cage. Inside the cages, remains of fresh foods consumed by lions at the zoo and their excrement were left on the floor. On the first day of his stay in Glasgow, Huang Yong Ping had visited the local historical museum and found out that a lion caught in Africa during the colonial era was exhibited there as a kind of a relic of the glory days of the British Empire. The lion also reminded him of the lion statues that are placed in from of Chinese buildings as guardians. His “realistic” installation had a startling impact on viewers when they stepped into the gallery and had to decide which gate to enter. Am I an “EC National” or an “Other”?
– Excerpt from Hou Hanru, “Change is the Rule,” House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective