Huang Yong Ping
11 June 2002 - The Nightmare of George V, 2002
Collection of the artist
Photo: Gene Pittman
HOUSE OF ORACLES
TEACHER’S STUDY GUIDE
SPRING 2007
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Vancouver Art Gallery
Teachers’ Guide for School Programs
House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective
Huang Yong Ping is a Chinese artist who has lived in Paris since 1989. This
exhibition, a retrospective containing over forty pieces of work, includes numerous
large-scale sculptural installations, many of them created from
unconventional—and sometimes provocative—materials. His spectacular works,
created over the last two decades, reveal the influences of both avant-garde
Western art and traditional Chinese philosophy.
DEAR TEACHER:
This guide will assist you in preparing for your tour of House of Oracles: A Huang
Yong Ping Retrospective. It also provides follow-up activities to facilitate
discussion after your Gallery visit. Engaging in the suggested activities before and
after your visit will reinforce ideas generated by the tour and build continuity
between the Gallery experience and your ongoing work in the classroom. Most
activities require few materials and can be adapted easily to the age level and
needs of your students. Underlined words in this guide are defined in the
Vocabulary section.
The tour of House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective has three main
goals:
1. To introduce students to Huang Yong Ping’s body of work and his complex
artistic practice.
2. To provide students with an opportunity to explore his work as it reflects
influences from Eastern and Western art, politics and philosophy.
3. To encourage students to consider his work within historical, geographical,
political, social and cultural contexts.
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Huang Yong Ping: Background Information
Huang Yong Ping was born in 1952 in Xiamen, China. He studied oil painting at Zhejiang
Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou, embracing the new-found ideas of expressionism and
abstract expressionism. He graduated in 1982.
In the late 1970s China began opening up its doors to international trade and
communication after thirty years of isolation. The idea of the individual or “self” did not
exist in the traditions of Chinese art, but from that point on, Western concepts of selfrealization and self-expression began to spread through the cultural landscape of China,
seriously challenging the dominant artistic style of socialist realism. Deeply influenced by
Marcel Duchamp and his writings on “the death of painting,” Huang Yong Ping worked to
subvert not just painting but this concern with individual emotional expression through
art. Since 1986, Huang Yong Ping has not painted. Instead, he has worked with
installations and performance art.
Huang Yong Ping was central in forming a radical avant-garde group known as Xiamen
Dada, which questioned the role of art in society. In 1986 the group presented a series
of group exhibitions that had a profound impact on China’s art community. In one
exhibition the artists set fire to all the work they had just exhibited, and in another they
moved construction materials from an adjacent building site into the galleries and
exhibited them in lieu of their own artwork. Huang Yong Ping felt that these were acts of
artistic liberation and commented that “art exists in its spiritual process, not in its
material results.”
Around this time, influenced by traditional Chinese philosophy and the importance of
concepts of chance in the Chan Buddhist world view, Huang Yong Ping introduced various
aspects of chance into his working process. He began to spin roulette wheels, toss
coins, throw dice and use divination systems found in the I Ching (Book of Changes),
which he still uses extensively today. He felt that these methods enabled him to create
artwork less influenced by his intellect and more independent of the individual artistic
ego and notions of self. He also felt that the idea of submission to chance was more
attuned to nature’s evolutionary process—an idea expressed in ancient Chinese
philosophies. As the writer/curator Hou Hanrou explains: “Everything is in permanent
flux. Change is the only ‘truth’.”
Ultimately, Huang Yong Ping supports the idea of mutual influence of Western and
Eastern cultures. Neither is supreme, replaceable or even pure; rather they chaotically
overlap and clash in an unending cycle of motion and transformation. He writes: “in my
opinion, the mutual influences among different cultures are very important. ‘West’,
‘East’, ‘self’ and ‘other’ are not fixed concepts.” He has demonstrated this idea in
numerous artworks, perhaps mostly clearly in the aptly titled 1987 work The History of
Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine
for Two Minutes, in which he displays the pulpy mass created by his action of washing
these two texts.
In 1989, Huang Yong Ping traveled to Paris to participate in an exhibition at the Georges
Pompidou Centre. While he was there, the now infamous Tiananmen Square massacre
occurred, and he decided not to return to China. He still lives in Paris and has exhibited
his work at major galleries and museums internationally. In addition, he has written
extensively about his artistic practice and philosophical beliefs.
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Western Influences:
Joseph Beuys (1921–1986)
Beuys was a German artist and teacher who came to prominence in the 1960s. He was a
controversial figure who greatly influenced the direction of post-war art. His provocative
installations and performances presented art as an egalitarian, healing process. Beuys
once said, “To make people free is the aim of art, therefore art for me is the science of
freedom.” His art installations, constructed from non-traditional materials like felt and
animal fat, challenged viewers to reconsider the role of beauty and craftsmanship in art.
Huang Yong Ping was influenced by Beuys’ ideas of the revolutionary and transformative
powers of art, and responded through his own artistic practice both indirectly and directly,
most obviously in his artwork The First Phone Call to Joseph Beuys after His Death.
Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)
Duchamp was a French artist who worked to engage the intellect and the imagination
through his artwork rather than simply engaging “the eye.” He was one of the most
influential artists of the twentieth century. His most controversial contribution to the
world of art was the “readymade.” In 1917 he inverted a urinal, titled it Fountain,
displayed it as art and shocked—and irrevocably changed—the art world. Duchamp
embraced humour as a valid aesthetic component of art. He was instrumental in
beginning the process in modern art that blurred the distinctions between everyday life
and high art, and between the worlds of objects and ideas. Important aspects of
Surrealism, abstraction, Pop Art and conceptual art have a common founding in
Duchamp’s work.
Huang Yong Ping was intrigued by Duchamp’s anti-elitist notions, which rocked the
prevailing values and the very foundations of Western art. With a group of fellow artists,
Huang took Duchamp’s ideas and created his own movement within the context of the
Chinese avant-garde, and called it Xiamen Dada.
John Cage (1912–1992)
Cage was an American thinker, writer, composer and artist whose most famous work was
a composition titled 4’33”. This piece, first performed in 1952 by a respected pianist,
consisted of a completely silent composition in three movements. In this short piece,
Cage broke away from the history of classical composition, proposing that the primary act
of musical performance was not making music, but listening. Cage was an
interdisciplinary collaborator and mentor, and he worked closely with other artists who,
like him, were interested in making art in ways that broke free of the rigid forms of the
past. He was also deeply immersed in studies of Eastern philosophies. He created sound
for performances that investigated the ways music composed through chance procedures
could become beautiful works of art. Many of Cage's ideas about what music could be
were inspired by Marcel Duchamp. Like Duchamp, he found music around him and did
not necessarily rely on expressing something from within.
Huang Yong Ping addresses Cage directly in his writings, and responds to his
understanding of Chan Buddhism and the I Ching, which have become important parts of
Huang Yong Ping’s life and artistic practice.
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Eastern Influences:
Chan Buddhism
Chan is a major form of Chinese Buddhism generally known in the West by its Japanese
name, Zen. Chan teaches that enlightenment takes place when one discovers one's own
internal dormant Buddha or “Buddha nature.” Chan emphasizes daily life experience over
book learning and ritual practice, and stresses that “one can attain awakening in
everyday life and thought.”
Huang Yong Ping has written about Chan as a construction of knowledge, a way of
thinking that sidesteps or overcomes the limitations of logic and linearity inherent in
Western modernism. He was a founding member of Xiamen Dada, an artists’ collective
that quoted Chan Buddhism as a way of providing guidance for individuals to free
themselves from doctrine and dogma.
I Ching
The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is one of the most important Chinese classic texts. It is
a system that lies at the heart of Chinese cultural beliefs, and it is structured on the
regular patterns of change evident in the world around us, represented as the oscillations
of yin and yang. In the I Ching, events are part of a continuum or process, and the text
stresses the importance of being sensitive to the rhythms of change and following along
with them. The patterns of change are presented in 64 abstract line arrangements called
hexagrams, which are consulted (by throwing stalks or coins) to provide insight into the
way things are unfolding.
Huang Yong Ping has used the I Ching’s description and understanding of change as one
source in establishing the founding principles of his work. The I Ching helps him distance
himself from the Western idea of the role of the artist “as an autonomous creator who
creates something from nothing.” He goes on to say: “In China, the individuality is not so
important. In terms of philosophy, traditional Chinese philosophers never said ‘I say’, but
always said ‘Our ancestors said’. It is a way of accessing reality. This is the reason I use
the I Ching.”
Taoism
Over more than two millennia, the world view of Taoists has influenced many facets of
Chinese culture, including medicine, art, religion and even movement. Daoists
understand the complexity of the world as having emerged from a unity that they refer to
as the Tao. If one can cultivate a life of simplicity with few desires or rigid perspectives, it
is possible to embody and attune oneself to Tao. In this way one is in harmony with the
constant flux of the world.
Taosim presents a very different approach to the Western world's linear interpretation of
history and the universe. Huang Yong Ping finds in Taoism a holistic approach that
accepts history not as a logical progression of events but as a succession of opposed
but complementary phases. Daoists are less concerned with being than becoming, and
this philosophy allows Huang to straddle the divide between the East and the West,
finding a balance between otherwise irreconcilable traditions and philosophies.
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Six Works from House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective
Passage
This installation consists of two large cages containing lion feces and decomposing
bones positioned below airport immigration signs reading “national” and “other.” The
museum visitor must choose a door to walk through, as one would at the airport; but
whichever choice is made, the visitor is confronted with the animal cages containing the
scent of the “other.”
Huang Yong Ping talks about the idea for Passage coming out of his experiences as a
non-Westerner travelling over Western borders. For him, going through passport control
and having to choose between “EC Nationals”’ and “Others” gave rise to questions
about identity—notions of “us” and “them,” and ideas about the “other.”
Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank
This huge sculpture—approximately 6 x 4 metres and 3.5 metres high—is a replica of
the Shanghai branch of the Hongkong Shanghai Banking Corporation. It is made out of
sand mixed with a small amount of concrete, and was created by pouring this
mixture—all 40,000 pounds of it—into enormous moulds. As the sculpture dries during
the period of the exhibition, it slowly begins to crumble and disintegrate.
This Shanghai bank, built in 1923 during the peak of the British Empire’s colonial
activities, could originally only be accessed by Chinese people through the back door.
Under Communist rule, it became the Shanghai Municipal Government Building. In the
late 1990s the building once more became a bank, one that is a major investor in
Shanghai’s new economic development. In this work, Huang Yong Ping addresses
multiple issues, ranging from colonialism to impermanence and the failure of economic
structures to fulfill their promises.
Bat Project IV
Airplane sections, bamboo scaffolding, plastic fencing, assorted documents and bats
prepared by taxidermists are some of the unusual materials that constitute this work, the
fourth version of the controversial Bat Project. The first three versions, constructed in
China and France, were censored and removed from public display at the behest of
Chinese, French and American authorities.
The inspiration for the original Bat Project was a collision between an American
surveillance aircraft—with a bat logo on its tail wing—and a Chinese fighter jet in the
South China Sea. Long after the incident, the plane was dismantled and airlifted back to
the United States. That is when Huang Yong Ping read about it—as a news “event.”
Huang was interested in the international power politics and global implications of the
incident, as well as the secrecy and censorship that surrounded the collision itself and,
subsequently, his artwork. He liked the idea of “slicing” up the airplane parts,
dismantling the plane (as the original plane had been dismantled in order to be returned
to the United States) to turn a real-life situation into a work of art.
Theater of the World
This living installation is an allegorical representation of power dynamics relating
to contemporary issues of ecology and environmental sustainability. The work
contains feeder crickets, pink-toed tarantulas, hissing cockroaches, giant
millipedes, scorpions, small lizards, snakes and small toads. It finds inspiration
in “Gu”, the eighteenth hexagram and chapter of the I Ching that represents
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decay. It also describes a “magical” poison said to have been made in South
China prepared by putting five venomous creatures-a centipede, a snake, a
scorpion, a toad and a lizard-in a pot and leaving them for a year.
The House of Oracles
A large military tent houses large roulette wheels, a divination table, weapon-like metal
bars covered in pulp (made out of ancient divination books) and other objects. The tent,
which is part of this installation, also served as a studio where Huang Yong Ping
produced works for his exhibitions—an interesting parallel to a military tent used to plan
battle strategies. This work also reminds us that the term “avant-garde” has meaning in
the context of the military (the advance guard) as well as in the art world.
Huang Yong Ping consults the I Ching and the oracles on all his projects, and is guided in
his work and process in a way that is antithetical to Western practice. He speaks of
following Chinese traditions to shake off Western influences, minimizing the individual
power of the artist and returning to traditional Eastern values which are aligned more
closely with nature.
11 June 2002—The Nightmare of George V
This monumental sculpture of a disturbingly real-looking, life-sized elephant with a tiger
climbing the seat on its back, is made out of concrete, reinforced steel and painted
cowhide and rabbit fur. The seat, resting on a huge fabric cushion, is made of wood and
cane and is emblazoned with the British royal crest.
Huang Yong Ping has cited several references that inspired him in creating this work. In a
natural history museum in Paris, he saw a taxidermic display of a tiger attacking an
elephant. He noticed that the tiger was arranged in a position similar to that of King
George V in photographs taken in 1911, as he stood on an elephant’s back in order to
shoot a tiger (he was said to have shot four tigers in a single day). In this work Huang
addresses Western colonialism and shows that natural history is closely linked to
political history.
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PRE-VISIT ACTIVITY: Material Installations
(intermediate and secondary students)
Objectives:
Students consider Huang Yong Ping’s use of non-traditional art materials and
create a design for their own installation.
Discussion:
Huang Yong Ping has used materials not traditionally thought of as appropriate for
works of art. Some of his more unusual materials include aircraft parts, military
tents and, more provocatively, live insects and stuffed bats.
It is important to explore the implications of using these real-world (as opposed to
art-world) materials and consider how non-traditional art materials are used to
express complex ideas. Many of Huang Yong Ping’s ideas resonate with the
conceptual approach to artistic practice, the idea that art resides in the ideas, not
in the object itself. Other artists who have used unconventional materials to push
artistic boundaries include:
• Marcel Duchamp: displayed his first “readymade”—a bottle drying rack—in
1914.
• Joseph Beuys: created artworks out of felt and animal fat, and gave
performances in which he cradled a dead hare.
• Jana Sterbak: stitched together 60 pounds of raw flank steak to create a
dress, which was displayed on a mannequin in 1987.
Materials:
• Writing materials
• Large sheets of paper, coloured pencils and/or markers
• Descriptions of Huang’s work (see “Five Works from House of Oracles,”
above)
Process:
1. Ask students the following questions:
• What materials are sculptures usually made from? Possible answers
include: wood, clay, marble, steel, plastic, bronze, plaster.
• Can you think of any particular sculptures you have seen in real life or in
books, and remember what they were made of? Possible answers include:
Michelangelo’s David (marble), Rodin’s The Thinker (bronze), totem poles
(wood), etc
• What makes these sculptural materials appropriate for art? Who decides?
• Can you think of any unusual sculptures, made from less traditional
materials? Where have you seen them? In a park? On the beach?
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2. Tell students that Huang Yong Ping has used the following materials to create
sculptures: sand, live insects and rodents, stuffed and mounted bats, rabbit
pelts, airplane parts and animal feces. Ask the students:
• Are these materials appropriate for sculptures?
• Can you imagine what a sculpture using any of these materials might look
like?
3. Describe (or have students read the descriptions of) two of Huang’s
sculptures/installations; for example, Passage and Bank of Sand, Sand of
Bank. Discuss the implications of the materials Huang Yong Ping has chosen
to work with, e.g.:
• Does including smelly lion feces in an artwork make the experience seem
more real somehow?
• Does the smell add anything to how you think about the work?
• What does sand make you think of (play, impermanence, crumbling…)?
• What is Huang Yong Ping saying about banks by building one out of sand?
4. In small groups, ask students to imagine they have been invited to make a
large-scale sculpture or installation out of any material they want. THINK BIG!
Tell students that any materials available on Earth are available to them.
• Have students choose an idea. Encourage them to think hard about an
issue that is important to them.
• Ask them to describe and plan the sculpture in detail.
• On a large piece of paper, have them sketch it—from more than one angle,
label it and make notes describing or explaining parts of it, giving
dimensions, colours, details.
• Have students make a list of all the materials they will need to create it.
• Have them explain and justify the materials they have chosen. Why are
these materials appropriate for such an artwork? How do they contribute to
the meaning of the work?
5. Have each group present their idea to the rest of the class.
Conclusion:
Have the whole class discuss the project designs. What if the students could
actually create the artwork for the school? Where would they build it? What do
they think the response of the school community would be?
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PRE-VISIT ACTIVITY: Cultural Diversity, Cultural Clash
(primary grades)
Objectives:
Students consider and research creatures that have strong symbolic meanings in
different cultures, and use drawing and poetry to represent this multiplicity of
meaning.
Discussion:
Huang Yong Ping was born in China and now lives in France. He has been
influenced by elements of both Western and Eastern cultures, ideas and
philosophies. He explores the ways Eastern and Western cultures overlap and
clash; they influence and change one another. His artworks reflect this duality and
offer multiple perspectives on global issues.
Materials:
• The Internet
• Books
• Worksheet table (see page following)
• Art supplies: paper, black sharpies, watercolour paints, paintbrushes
• Antonym Diamante Poem format (see page following)
Process:
1. Have students work in small groups with the worksheet table, and try to
figure out the symbolic meanings of the animals for different cultures. They
may use the Internet, books, each other or their families as resources.
(“Other” on the worksheet might be filled in with students’ or teacher’s
countries of origin.) Have the class discuss the groups’ findings.
2. Have the students work in pairs to create an image of an animal
representing the creature from multiple cultural perspectives. They can
choose an animal from the worksheet or another animal. For example, the
pig represents many important characteristics in Chinese culture. Students
might choose to portray the pig as a warm, gracious, generous hostess in
a party dress offering food, while trailing piles of dirt and garbage to reflect
the negative associations with pigs typical in mainstream Canadian culture.
Have students use black sharpies to outline their creature, and paint to
add colour. They can use the sharpies to add words, comments and
information to their drawings.
3. Have each pair write a poem expressing both interpretations of their
creature. An Antonym Diamante Poem (see page following) provides a good
structure, but any other format deemed appropriate would be fine.
4. Lay out the poems on one work table and the images on another, and see
if the class can match up each image with its accompanying poem.
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Conclusion:
Ask students to think about areas of their lives that have been influenced by more
than one culture: food, festivals, clothing, books, furniture, art, religious items in
their homes, etc.
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What meanings do these animals have in the different cultures?
RAT
COW
BAT
OTHER
Canada
China
India
(muskrat)
(buffalo)
First Nations
or
Native
American
Other
Other
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Antonym Diamante Poem
A Diamante Poem consists of seven lines arranged in a diamond shape. An
Antonym Diamante Poem begins and ends with nouns that are opposite to, or
contrasting with, one another. For example, hot and cold, or summer and winter.
Nouns, adjectives and participles are arranged in a particular order to describe
the topic, moving from one noun to its opposite. The middle line of the poem
forms the transition between the contrasts.
Example: Pig
Friend
Sincere, generous
Serving, waiting, watching,
Giving your best, giving your worst,
Snorting, scavenging, scratching
Rancid, ravenous
Foe
Format:
Line 1: Starting topic: noun
Line 2: Two adjectives describing starting topic
Line 3: Three “–ing words” (participles) about starting topic
Line 4: Four nouns or a short phrase linking starting and ending topic
Line 5: Three “–ing words” (participles) about ending topic
Line 6: Two adjectives describing ending topic
Line 7: Ending topic: noun; opposite to or contrasting with starting topic
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PRE-VISIT ACTIVITY: Global Diversity
(secondary students)
Objective:
Students consider and research a global conflict and create an art piece reflecting
multiple viewpoints.
Discussion:
Huang Yong Ping was born in China and now lives in France. He has been
influenced by elements from both Western and Eastern cultures, ideas, and
philosophies. He explores the ways the cultures of the East and West overlap and
clash; they influence and change one another. His artworks reflect this duality and
repeatedly offer multiple perspectives on global issues.
Materials:
• The Internet
• Local newspapers
• Art supplies/materials
Process:
1. Working in small groups, have students look through local newspapers and
identify some major international or global conflicts or hot political issues
occurring at the moment. Discuss as a class and choose a single issue
that is controversial and could be explored or viewed from multiple
perspectives.
2. On the board, create a web representing multiple points of view on this
issue. Ask students to imagine concerns people their age, living in these
situations, might have.
3. Have students work in small groups or at home to search the Internet for
information about the conflict from varying perspectives. For example, if
their issue concerns the US/Iraq conflict, they could look for articles from
Iraqi, American, French and Syrian newspapers and journals.
4. Have students read, analyze and discuss their findings with their group and
as a class.
5. Have students work in pairs to create a visual artwork that presents the
conflict from different perspectives (e.g., Iraqi and American). Their work
could take many different forms. Some possibilities:
• Cartoon
• Words or poems interspersed with drawings, or a drawing labeled
with poetry
• Combination of drawing and torn-paper collage (perhaps using
newspapers in different languages) to represent different cultural
aspects
• Sculpture made out of papier mâché, clay, wood, sand and/or other
materials
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•
Have students look at each other’s works and discuss the different
perspectives they see.
Conclusion:
Ask students to think about areas of their lives that have been influenced by more
than one culture: food, festivals, clothing, books, furniture, art, religious items in
their homes, etc.
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PRE- or POST-VISIT ACTIVITY: By Chance
(all levels)
Objective:
Students make mixed-media group artworks in a process based on chance, and
discuss the process.
Discussion:
Huang Yong Ping has used various instruments of divination to make choices in
producing his artworks. He has spun roulette wheels, tossed coins, thrown dice
and used the divination systems of the I Ching (which he still uses). In doing so,
he has found unexpected solutions to problems encountered during his artistic
process.
Hou Hanrou, who has written extensively about Huang Yong Ping, writes “...Huang
Yong Ping’s way of ‘creating art’ and ‘showing art’ goes totally beyond planning
and execution. It’s uncertain and uncontrollable, and his works always end up
deferring and even betraying his original concepts and formal structures… they
often end up ‘unformal’ and even dematerialized, like an iceberg melting into
water.”
Materials:
• Six different bases—one for each group’s artwork: e.g., a box, a Styrofoam
ball, a wooden block, a piece of cardboard, a ball of yarn, a lump of clay
• Six slips of paper describing the modus operandi they will use to create
their work: e.g., with open eyes, blindfolded, dropping items from two feet
in the air, directing your group members, using your “wrong” hand, not
using your thumb
• Glue
• 6 dice and 6 pennies
• 2 pots of paint, different colours, with paintbrushes, labeled #6
• Arranged on a central table: 5 different piles of items to glue on the base,
labeled #1 through #5: e.g., #1) popsicle sticks, #2) bits of aluminum foil,
#3) strands of wool, #4) scraps of fabric, #5) cut-up words or phrases
• Other ideas: twigs, leaves, wood offcuts, pebbles or gravel, torn-up
magazines or coloured paper, cut-up plastic bags
Process:
1. Divide the students into six groups and explain that each group will be
creating an artwork using varying methods of chance.
2. Have each group draw lots for their base.
3. Have each group draw lots for their modus operandi.
4. Give each group some glue, a die and a penny.
5. Have students throw the die and attach something to their base according
to the number they throw. For example, if they throw a 3, they take a piece
of wool and glue it onto their base (dropping it from above and sticking it
where it lands, or blindfolded, or whichever process their group has drawn.
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6. If they throw a 6, they apply some paint. But first they must flip a coin to
determine what colour they will use; e.g., heads = blue, tails = red.
7. Rules can be changed (or artworks rotated, or modi operandi switched) by
the teacher or a student as the activity continues. Make it more random
and arbitrary!
8. The artwork is finished when the teacher says so.
9. As a class, students look at all the work, noting similarities and
differences.
Conclusion:
Discuss the process, and the artistic results, with the class. Ask students:
• How was it to “give over” to the idea of chance?
• Did you have a sense of liberation, or did you feel frustrated at giving up
artistic control?
• What would it be like to use the idea of chance again to make art or in any
other area of your life?
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VOCABULARY
avant-garde: Two very different definitions of the term are relevant in this exhibition:
a. Artwork: non-traditional, forward-thinking, innovative and experimental—often used to
describe art, particularly modern artistic practice in the first half of the twentieth
century.
b. Military: the advance guard, specialized soldiers who surveyed the field prior to
sending the army into battle.
colonialism: The extension of a country’s sovereignty over another land by populating it
with settlers, and/or by ruling over the people who already live there.
conceptual art: art in which the ideas behind the creation of the work were seen as more
significant than the end product. Conceptual artists rejected the idea of the unique,
precious art object and focused on intellectual explorations into artistic practice.
Dada: An “anti-art” movement that started in Switzerland during the First World War. It
rejected traditional culture and aesthetics. Through random, irrational and often
destructive acts, Dada challenged the art world to question bourgeois values and
intellectual rigidity.
high art: art that is considered elevated beyond the ordinary and the mundane;
associated with rigorous academic and intellectual traditions.
installation: art that is created from a wide range of sculptural materials and installed in
a specific environment. An installations may be temporary or permanent, but
documentation is often an important part of the artwork. The term became widely used in
the 1970s, and many installation works were conceptual.
performance art: works in any of a variety of media that are performed before a live
audience. The performance itself, rather than a specific object, constitutes the artwork.
retrospective: an exhibition of work from an extended period of an artist's activity.
socialist realism: the official—and only acceptable—style of art in Communist Russia and
China during the Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976. It was devoted to glorifying the state,
telling stories of its heroic leaders and idealizing the working class.
Xiamen Dada: an artists’ collective that formed in Huang Yong Ping’s hometown of
Xiamen in 1986. Like the original Dada movement it was named for, it challenged
traditional ideas about art by creating “anti-art” cultural expressions, including public
gatherings, demonstrations and publication of anti-establishment manifestos in
art/literary journals.
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RESOURCES
Print:
Eiger, Dietmar. Dadaism. Köln: Taschen Basic Art, 2004.
Gough-Cooper, Jennifer, et al. Marcel Duchamp: A Life in Pictures. London: Atlas
Press, 1999.
Hartz, Paula R. Taoism (World Religions). New York: Facts on File, 2004.
Hu, Hsiao-Lan, and William Cully Allen. Taoism (Religions of the World).
Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publications, 2005.
Johnson, Julie Tallard. I Ching for Teens: Take Charge of Your Destiny with the
Ancient Chinese Oracle. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2001.
Marzona, Daniel. Conceptual Art. Köln: Taschen Basic Art, Art Movements, 2005.
Metcalf, Franz Aubrey. Buddha in Your Backpack: Everyday Buddhism for Teens.
Berkeley: Ulysses Press, 2003.
Rosenthal, Mark. Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments. London: Tate,
2005.
Vergne, Philippe, and Doryun Chung, eds. House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping
Retrospective. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2005.
Online:
www.artandculture.com
An excellent online magazine and resource site on contemporary art and culture.
www.artcyclopedia.com
Online art encyclopedia, listing international artists and museums and galleries
with collections of their work. Includes information on art historical trends and a
large selection of reproductions of artworks.
www.wikipedia.com
Online dictionary and encyclopedia with good background and biographical
information on artists.
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