Huang Yong Ping
editBiography link
http://visualarts.walkerart.org/oracles/details.wac?id=2436
Huang Yong Ping was born in 1954 in Xiamen, Fujian province in southwestern China. He graduated from the Fine Arts Academy of Zhejiang where he studied oil painting.
http://visualarts.walkerart.org/oracles/details.wac?id=2232&title=Writings
In the mid-1980s Huang Yong Ping founded Xiamen Dada, a gathering of artists from his hometown of Xiamen. The group, one of the most subversive in the history of Chinese art, had immense influence on China’s revolutionary avant-garde art movement during the last two decades of the twentieth century. During 1986, Xiamen Dada staged "group exhibitions." At the first event on November 23, 1986, the artists set fire to all the works of a previous exhibition, declaring, "Dada is dead; beware of the fire!"
http://visualarts.walkerart.org/oracles/details.wac?id=2232&title=Writings
In December of 1986, Xiamen Dada held another exhibition at the Fujian Art Museum. In the application to rent the space, they declared that they would exhibit paintings and sculptures. Instead, they moved construction materials from a nearby courtyard into the galleries, installing them in the same configuration. In an announcement for the exhibit, they stated:
It seems redundant to ask whether or not an object shown officially at the art museum is an artwork, and the producers of these objects also think that it is meaningless to affirm that they are artworks. In this exhibition, we come empty-handed and, in the end, leave empty-handed. This is an exhibition of works without “works.”
The most remarkable actions the group carried out were its “group exhibitions” of 1986. The first event took place on November 23, 1986. In front of the Cultural Palace of Xiamen, the artists set fire to all the works that had been shown in their exhibition held in the previous month, declaring, “Dada is dead; beware of the fire!”
In the mid-1980s, Huang founded the Xiamen Dada group and staged radical happenings. His work, after 1986, took the form of installations of modified prefabricated objects and performance art. [1]
Huang left China in May 1989 to participate in the exhibition Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou. He has resided in Paris ever since. In Spring 2006, Mass MoCA [1] presented 'House of Oracles,' a retrospective of his work, including the controversial 'Theater of the World' and 'Bat Project II.'