Huang Yong Ping (黄永砯）

Huang Yong Ping, born in 1954 in Xiamen, Fujian Province

Living and working in Paris since 1989

Huang Yong Ping was born in Xiamen, Fujian province in southwestern China, and studied oil painting at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou.

Since 1989, he has been living and working in Paris. Huang has been featured in many of the world’s most prominent venues of contemporary art.

Recognized to be the most controversial and provocative artist in the 1980s in the Chinese art scene, Huang Yong Ping was one of the first artists to consider that art was a strategy. He was initially a self-taught student educating himself under three well-known men. Joseph Beuys, well known German artist and art theorist, John Cage, an American music theorist and philosopher, and Marcel Duchamp, a French artist

Huang Yong Ping’s works combine many media and disparate cultural influences. He is strongly influenced by the intellectual abstraction of Dada and by the traditions of Chinese numerology. Founder of the Xiamen Dada group in China in the 1980s, Huang's installations have included unorthodox materials such as live snakes and scorpions. He was dedicated to creating a new cultural identity and bridging Western Modernism and Chinese traditions of Taoism and Zen.

In 1989, Huang Yong Ping was invited to Paris to participate in the seminal exhibition Magicians of the Earth at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Following this exhibition, Huang Yong Ping relocated to Paris, where he has lived and worked ever since.

Since his move to the West, issues of cultural identity and East-West dynamics seem never far from Huang's mind.