Huang Yong Ping work banished in China - Artworld - Bat Project 2 removed from Guangzhou Triennial

On Nov. 16, just two days before the opening of China's First Guangzhou Triennial at the Guangdong Museum of Art, foreign ministry officials completed the removal of Huang Yong Ping's Bat Project 2, a massive outdoor installation that, in its partially completed state, had briefly dominated the museum's entrance court. The work was a full-scale model of the cockpit section and left wing of an American EP-3 spy plane, the type of craft that collided with a Chinese fighter jet in March 2001, killing the Chinese pilot, before making an emergency landing on Hainan Island with its surveillance equipment and crew intact. (A major international standoff, the first geopolitical test of nerve for the new Bush administration, then ensued as the 24 U.S. military personnel, having attempted to destroy their most secret devices and data, were held for 11 days while the impounded plane was scrutinized by PRC intelligence experts. The EP-3 was eventually dismantled and returned to U.S. custody.)

The act of censorship in Guangzhou (formerly Canton) seems particularly ironic, given that the 135-artist show highlights works and practitioners at the forefront of China's post-Tiananmen Square shift toward greater formal and thematic liberality in visual art. On view until Jan. 19, "Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art, 1990-2000," was assembled under the lead curatorship of University of Chicago scholar Wu Hung, who has written extensively about the struggle to establish true openness in China's contemporary art scene. [A full-length report on the show will appear in a forthcoming issue of A.i.A.] Local observers are quick to point out, however, that this process is largely a cat-and-mouse game in which artists insistently probe the limits of acceptability, while government functionaries struggle, often inconsistently, to apply policy guidelines issuing from high Communist Party circles in Beijing. Enforcement these days takes the form of prohibiting certain works or closing offensive shows--not of Cultural Revolution-style "re-education" or imprisonment.

Indeed, the Bat Project 2 incident may reflect China's international caution following its recently successful drive for World Trade Organization membership. A petition circulated at the triennial by protesting artists contains a detailed chronology that suggests the Chinese government's intervention was prompted, at least in part, by a wish to placate French--and ultimately American--diplomatic concerns, real or conjectured. The objectionable work, as its title indicates, is actually the second version of Huang Yong Ping's EP-3 project. The first, created in December 2001 for "Transplanted Site," the Fourth Sculpture Exhibition in Shenzhen (jointly organized by China and France), was halted in mid-construction and transported, without the artist's consent, to the Huanlegu Amusement Park, where it was landscaped into a permanent attraction. Authorities reportedly feared that the piece, a 65-foot-long replica of the aircraft's fuselage and tail, might otherwise damage relations between China, France and the U.S.

Despite the earlier controversy, the triennial selection committee--prompted by member Huang Zhuan, curator of the Shenzhen show--invited the Paris-based Huang Yong Ping to exhibit the original work in Guangzhou. When moving and restoration costs proved exorbitant, the artist developed plans for a new model, featuring the plane parts not previously reproduced, that would form a conceptual link with the first version.

Once assembly was under way, according to the artists' petition signed by 33 participants in the triennial, the Chinese foreign ministry was presented with photos of the work-in-progress taken by American consulate staff members. The French consulate, meanwhile, informed the museum that it should be dropped from the list of acknowledgements in the triennial catalogue. Exhibition organizers were told that the French consul general would not attend the event, since he did not wish to be photographed in the vicinity of the politically sensitive work. Finally, on Nov. 12, the Guangdong Province cultural office was instructed by the national foreign affairs ministry, allegedly at the urging of the French and American embassies in Beijing, to exclude Bat Project 2 from the show and catalogue. The charge of undue pressure is denied by local consular officials of both nations.

On Nov. 16, the work was taken apart and loaded onto six large trucks. By Nov. 18, all that remained for inquiring viewers were a few small scraps of metal integrated into a garbage-based installation surrounding artist Song Dong's clear-plastic "media yurt" on the museum's side lawn.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group