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Huang Yong Ping at Barbara Gladstone - New York - Brief Article
Art in America, May, 2002 by Lilly Wei
Straddling cultures and religions--in this case, Christian, Muslim and Buddhist--Paris-based, Chinese-born artist Huang Yong Ping impressively and impassively mixed and matched philosophies, iconographies and mediums in his third solo show in New York. Founder of the Xiamen Dada group in China in the 1980s and greatly influenced by Duchamp, Cage and Beuys, Huang has been previously known for his subversive installations and unorthodox materials, which have included live snakes and scorpions. Less mordant, less confrontational, and with higher production values than most of his previous endeavors seen in the U.S., the featured work in his latest exhibition was a beautifully crafted, smoothly handsome representation of a Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheel, many times enlarged. Made of wood, red-gold copper and green-gold bronze, the wheel had been dismantled into several parts--wheel, cover, rod, scrolls--scattered throughout the gallery's various rooms. Near the door, the embossed metal cover and long pointed handle suggested the shield and spear of a sentry, challenging the viewer's right of entry. Farther back, regally reposed, was a giant copper wheel containing a tightly furled scroll inscribed with the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum--the prayer said to encapsulate all the teachings of the Buddha. Here the prayer wheel's deconstruction read as a symbolic act of irony, violence and sacrilege, but it also hinted as well at the potential for reconstitution and reconciliation.
In the gallery's project room, the model for an unexecuted proposal for the Chapelle St. Louis de la Salpetriere in Paris demonstrated what this prayer wheel would look like restored. Meant to be placed at the church's center, surrounded by Islamic prayer rugs and set in continuous motion, it is a timely, if utopian, image of the integration of three of the world's religions, peacefully coexisting. The simplest piece in the show, succinct and elegant, was Two Typhoons (2001), a pair of enormous scrolls, rolled and burnt at the edges, one written in Sanskrit, the other in Arabic, that were pulled upward to resemble minarets in a further clash of cultures.
The theme of the wheel was repeated in a wooden cart the size of a car called Chariot du cycle de 60 ans (1999)--the 60-year cycle being a common reckoning unit in traditional China. The allegorical vehicle, based on the ancient perpetually south-pointing chariot, was raised on two uneven sets of wheels and, in another nod to the ecumenical, studded with Roman numerals and Chinese radicals. At the top was a male figure in traditional dress, hand raised, looking expressionlessly but nonetheless prophetically into the distance. Huang has long criticized and challenged institutional power; here, it seems, he was co-opting, if perhaps a little too rhetorically, another kind of power for his own ends.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
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