contemporary monkey

If you Google Huang Yong Ping + Bat Project, you’ll find news on Huang’s attempt to build and show a replica plane from a historical event, along with the news reports of the 2001 event itself. Funnily enough, you’ll also get the same data when you visit Huang’s work at the Nottingham Contemporary Gallery. It’s a kind of aircraft powered by search engine.

The American Spy Plane: The Bat

At the Nottingham Contemporary Gallery, until 26 June, Huang is displaying a handful of works focused on globalisation. He combines Eastern philosophy with Western conceptualism yielding results that are more journalism than art. The biggest piece is a can’t-miss object, thrust manly, at the entrance to the gallery: a section of a plane’s fuselage seemingly crash-landed inside Gallery One. Remember that scene in the movie, “Romancing the Stone” where the semi-hermit Jack Colton, played by Michael Douglas, finds a ruined, marijuana transport plane in the Central American jungle, and is surprised to discover, through a four-year old newspaper used for packing, that the Doobie Brothers had broken up (years earlier)? I was hoping for something similar on Huang’s plane, a sort of treasure that comes alive from exploring a downed aircraft.

My hopes materialised somewhat, but in the end they were unfulfilled. On display were photo-copies of previous news reports from the 2001 encounter between a US spy plane, and a nosy Chinese fighter jet. Somehow the fighter jet managed to lose a battle with a twin engine spy plane, but, never mind. The incident was embarrassing for both countries, and nobody really knew what to say, expect perhaps “excuse me”. Speculation was rife in those days of what the Americans were doing flying over China in the first place, and the incident turned into an east-meets-west at 20,000 feet. Huang wanted to capture that “cultural moment” by re-constructing the front half of the arrested American plane, but was continually rebuffed by his own government at various stages of the process. The underlying suspicion was the Americans had pressured the Chinese to keep the collision event low-profile, and the Chinese capitulated (probably for some money and the rights to Scooby Doo). Huang uses the Nottingham fuselage as a sort of library for media clips, newspaper reports, official letters and faxes on the three separate dates when his re-animated plane was taken apart and removed from Chinese galleries or public places.

The daggers of Jack Colton upon learning the Doobie Brothers have broken up.

Apparently the piece was so political, it couldn’t find a home in mainland China. So what do you do if you’re a Chinese citizen, living in Paris at the time, and you can’t show your work in the home country? Where’s your go-to centre for subversive schemes? Probably somewhere big and western and modern and contemporary; something like the Tate Modern. Except, a hunted-down Chinese artist is already using the space at Tate. Fine; where to next? The city of fomenting rebellion: Nottingham! (I say cheekily, but not being dismissive of the lovely city at all, just, well, you know, it’s not on your list of top ten places to show your mutinous, revolutionary art. Even with the Robin Hood legend).

The exhibit/demonstration sounds well and truly newsy, doesn’t it? And it is. The plane is strewn with reportage, which makes the idea more historical evidence that political theatre. It’s journalism gone arty and made me wonder if this is really effective. It doesn’t much advance the conversation for western, modern, or contemporary art that it purports to be influenced by? (The gallery’s guide reveals the artists John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Beuys are influences for a group Huang founded in China, called Xiamen Dada Group.)

Bats hanging from inside The Bat

Nottingham’s Gallery guide also states, “His work examines how cultures collide and transform as a result of massive political and economic forces – imperialism, for example, or rapid economic globalisation.” This might be something you would have read a decade ago in the financial section of the newspapers. Again, how is this effective? Why this, now?

Finding more Huang online from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis turns up an earlier exhibition from 2005. From the Walker’s gallery notes: “Huang Yong Ping has created an artistic universe comprised of provocative installations that challenge the viewer to reconsider everything from the idea of art, to national identity, to recent history.” Does it really challenge us on national identity? Haven’t we always been challenged on national identity, either with or without art? Or is this simply a workshop or lab for a Chinese artist trapped behind a wall of political singularity for decades, trying to make sense of a world newly released upon the senses? This specific piece, in my mind, shows more discovery of self placed inside western modernism – one person’s poetry – than a challenge to the rest of us on our national identities, or recent histories. Come on Huang, keep up…