Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Huang Yong Ping. Since founding the Xiamen Dada group in China during the mid-1980s, he has garnered an international reputation as an avant-garde provocateur. Inspired by artists such as Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp, Huang Yong Ping has employed various media to develop a conceptual program utilizing the power of art to instigate reform. Redefining the notion of hybridization, Huang Yong Ping conflates the symbols of Eastern and Western art historical traditions and political events to explore the intersection of individual experience and broader manifestations of culture. 

For this exhibition, Huang Yong Ping has constructed porcelain and ceramic replicas of historic architecture. Emphasizing space as a vessel for life, Huang Yong Ping begins his exploration with a series of jar-like wells in which various creatures emerge. He expands upon this theme with monumental recreations of the Coliseum in Rome and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Both buildings could be seen as vessels, not only in their formal construction as buildings constructed around central courtyards, but also as fertile basins from which culture springs. From these iconic structures, violence issues forth, as both the Pentagon, as the nucleus of the United States military control, and the Coliseum, as the central arena for the Roman pastimes of blood sport, stand for imperial dominance within the course of history. Slyly, Huang Yong Ping has replaced blood and violence with lush fauna: in planting the crevices of these models with a variety of foliage, he not only reimagines these buildings as seedbeds for a more peaceful life, but in effect renders them inert. Becoming mute planters, these symbols of bloodshed and carnage grow into ruined relics, as creeping vines cover their façades. These works continue to subvert traditional modes of thinking and cultural stereotypes, which Huang Yong Ping investigates through the unique vantage of the expatriate artist. Living and working in both France and China has afforded him with the canny ability to dissect cultural production and create seemingly disparate juxtapositions which unfold into nuanced takes on history, national identity, and artistic practice.

Born in 1954, Huang Yong Ping participated in the seminal exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre” at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 1989, and represented France at the 1999 Venice Biennale. Last year, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis organized and premiered his retrospective, “House of Oracles,” which is on view at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, until February 25. Other solo exhibitions include: CCA Kitakyushu, Japan; De Appel, Amsterdam; Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris; Atelier d’Artistes de la Ville de Marseille; and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.