Huang Yong Ping
At the age of 35 in 1989, Huang traveled to Paris to partake in the exhibition Magiciens de la terre, later immigrated to France where he lived until his death.
[citation needed] In 1986, he formed Xiamen Dada (廈門達達) with Zha Lixiong, Liu Yiling, Lin Chun and Jiao Yaoming, as a postmodernist, radical avant-garde group.
His finished abstract works were determined either by dice, a roulette wheel and other apparatuses that helped create his pieces by chance or accident.
As a stage in his anti-self-expression phase, Huang let external forces influence his artwork and determine the final product based on the outcomes of inanimate objects, such as the roulette wheel or dice.
It was much like A "Book Washing" Project, a performance piece done in the artist's home in Xiamen, which came three years earlier than A Concise History of Modern Art.
[citation needed] After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, while Huang was in Paris for the Magiciens de la terre exhibition, he decided not to return to China.
[8] In 1996, Huang participated in Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, and in 1997, the "Skulptur.Projekte" in Münster, Germany with his sculpture "100 Arms of Guan-yin".
The retrosüpective featured more than forty works starting from his first exhibition Magicians of Earth (1989) up until then, showing the most significant ones of the past two decades, including Bat Project II (2002), The Nightmare of King George V (2002) and Python (2000).
Bat Project II historical background was Huang Yong Ping was going to recreate an exact replica of the U.S spy plane that crashed into a Chinese fighter, leading to controversy with in politics.
Renowned curator, Fei Dawei said: "This first retrospective of Huang Yongping originated at the Walker Art Centre in the United States.
It was shown at Mass Moca, the biggest contemporary museum in America and then Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, before traveling to its final venue, UCCA in Beijing.
[citation needed] For his first UK solo show in The Curve, Barbican Art Gallery, London from 25 June-21 September 2008 he created an installation that explored the imperial history between Britain and China in the 19th century, focusing on the Opium Wars.
Bat Project II (2002) was planned as a massive 20 x 15 x 6 m steel outdoor installation at the opening of China's First Guangzhou Triennial at the Guangdong Museum of Art.
The work, which was recreated in part in Huang's House of Oracles retrospective, was a full-scale model of the cockpit section and left wing of an American EP-3 spy plane, filled with taxodermically preserved bats.
[11] The 2008 exhibition of his piece, Theatre of the World, at the Vancouver Art Gallery met with Animal Rights protests and legal threats due to its reliance on the violent interaction between insects in an enclosed space.
