Inspired by a unique collection of statues from the Chinese province of Fujian (representing a pantheon of gods popular in China, discovered in the late nineteenth century by Johannes Jacobus Maria de Groot), preserved at the musée des Confluences, Huang Yong Ping has designed a new exhibition, that is both autobiographical and self-fictional. Autobiographical because the artist comes from the Fujian Province and has always seen these statues in "situation" before discovering "ethnographical" and coloured replicas; self-fictional, because for the artist, this is the illustration of the permissiveness of cultural fields and their floating meanings (History? Ethnography? Art? Heritage? Replica? Exoticism? etc.). This piece demonstrates the mechanism of the construction and homogenization of cultural fields.
Amoy/Xiamen combines the old and current name for this port city, connected together and distinguished by a simple slash mark. Xiamen was formerly known as Amoy and witnessed some of the city's first European travellers. Amoy/Xiamen is therefore the association of yesterday and today, of the past and the present.
This exhibition is organized with the support of musée des Confluences and the Galerie kamel mennour
Wednesday to Sunday, 11am - 6pm
2d floor of the museum
The artist
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Nom de l'artisteHuang Yong Ping
Born in 1954 in Xiamen in the Fujian Province of China, Huang Yong Ping participated in the 1989 exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre allowing him to become known in France. He moved to Paris, where he currently lives and works. He represented France at the 1999 Venice Biennial.
Huang Yong Ping died in October 2019.
More information
For the exhibition, Huang Yong Ping makes use of the 1000 m2 space of the second floor of the macLYON . The exhibition consists of a shift between biography, anthropology, recycling and creation – each oeuvre designates what could be referred to as a new “start”.
Just as Reptiles, created and exhibited at Les Magiciens de la Terre Exhibition, which "recycled" books and oblivion, history and fiction, for critical purposes.
A parallel could also be drawn to Mille bras de Guanyin [The Thousand Arms of Guanyin]. This sculpture was originally designed by the artist for a contemporary art project in Munster, Germany in 1997 but now old and damaged, has been dismantled. The artist however, has kept the partially destroyed arms that are shiny with age. The raised fist, symbolic of the labour force, a votive object, uniformization, globality, display?
We are here at the very heart of a very “modern” phenomenon: the “patrimonialisation of memories and consciences”. Such therefore, is the case with these Fujian statuettes that are for this exhibition part of his work, based on the artist’s decision, after being initially just a childhood memory for him, then an ethnographical object and finally a museum heritage characteristic of colonial cultural practices of a western society looking at the “Other”.
The ancient and the contemporary: a creation or an exhibition of previously seen relics? Ready-made and already-made? On the contrary, this is a new departure in a constantly evolving world, full of interconnections: a global, complex, powerful and poetic creation.
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Titre
The exhibition "Les magiciens de la terre" in 1989
In 1989, Huang Yong Ping presented Reptiles in Paris as part of the exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre. He uses the three washing machines to wash books on Chinese and western art and exhibits the result: the paper pulp. Can the mix between Asia and the West only result in a shapeless, dirty mush? The artist likes to underline that dirtiness is as essential to the world's order, as chaos.
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Titre
J.J.M. De Groot's collection at the Musée des Confluences
At the macLYON, Huang Yong Ping chose to display these statuettes from the Chinese pantheon as he
had seen them in the storeroom of the Musée des Confluences: on shelves, wrapped in plastic film, and labeled, just like a kind of cabinet of curiosities.
Informations supplémentaire programmation MAC
360° views of the exhibition
Catalogs
Catalogue Huang Yong Ping
Date created: 10/21/2020
Changed date: 10/21/2020
With essays by Thierry Raspail (director of the mac LYON), Donatien Grau (critic and writer), Doryun Chong (curator in MoMA, New York), Deirdre Emmons (curator in musée des Confluences, Lyon) and many exhibitions views.
Co-édition mac LYON / kamel mennour
160 pages, 40 €
