HUANG YONG PING
un cane italiano
October 9 - November 29, 2003
Have flair, if no radar
While the world beweals or mopes those giant thorns in its foot (the tragedy of 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, other regional wars and cultural clashes), five, among the forty artists of ‘Zone d’urgence’, worry about the geopolitical distortions of these ominous times.
Participating in this group, Huang Yong Ping relates, by way of a model, the collision above the Sea of China on April 1st 2001 between an American spy plane and a Chinese army plane. The piece, by the way, was barred from the first Triennale of Gunazhu in November 2002.
Today, Ping hangs all sorts of bats from the ‘temple’ vault of beaumontpublic, a gallery which likes to flirt with animal symbolism (Jan Fabre will not contradict me). We see coveys of stuffed bats, diving from the ceiling in a simaltaneously seductive and repulsive fashion.
Floating in midair, the dead bats watch a soccer game which takes place in a suspended replica of a stadium, where characters, some in burqas, others in GI uniforms, run around while, guess who’, Adidas arbiters the game. No winners, no losers. We don’t know the outcome of the match, but who cares, since the end of the world plays out elsewhere, in the close-up shadow of an asteroid. Indeed, on June 14th 2002, an asteroid, christened 2002MN, threatened to pulverize our planet from a mere distance of 120,000 kilometers. With a half smile, Ping depicts this event through a piece of levitating polystyrene, symbolizing our unconcerned blindness in the face of this (almost) apocalypse.
What’s noteworthy here, beside his humor, is Ping’s non-partisanship. ‘The works exposed are simply illustrations of current crises in quest of other humanistic items’.
But, pray tell, why the cane italiano’ on our invitation card, what does it promise? Well, the dog exists, enormous, made of aluminum, paw raised against the wall, blissfully relieved, with his fang disguised as a wink. Here is an irreristible shorcut between the discovery of the New World, named after Amerigo, the Italian navigator Vespucci’s first name, and an Italian breed of assault dogs, called Napolitan Watchdog.