Nave of the Grand Palais - © Grand Palais

Huang Yong Ping (born in 1954 in China, lives since 1989 in France and is installed today in Ivry-sur-Seine), is a major figure of the Chinese avant-garde of the 1980s. It was at this time that he founded the Xiamen Dada movement, whose watchword is "Zen is Dada, Dada is Zen". True founder of contemporary art in China, he carried out radical actions within this group which cultivated a certain taste for paradox and contestation by the absurd. From that time, his work established connections between art, life and politics. Inspired by mythical stories, whether religious or philosophical, he revisits and mixes beliefs and referents from East and West in a work that challenges our certainties. Arousing fascination and concern for the transformations of the world, it stages in a grandiose and dreamlike way animals and alerts us to the disturbing and disturbing news of these myths.

Huang Yong Ping is the artist of all excess. On numerous occasions he has demonstrated the power of his monumental installations which have become his trademark. From The Magicians of the Earth in 1989 where his machine-washed books invaded the space of the Grande Halle de la Villette, to his life-size Noah's Ark (Arche 2009, 2009) in the Fine Arts chapel of Paris, via the Venice Biennale (Un Homme, neuf animaux, 1999) where his mythological animals pierced the roof of the French Pavilion, the originality of these installations lies in their eminently contextual character: each work is directly inspired by the historical context , political, societal and architectural of its place of exhibition.

Thus Serpent d'Océan, a perennial work installed on the beach of Saint-Brévin-les-Pins, near Saint-Nazaire, is a metal snake skeleton 120 meters long, like a giant monster that seems stranded for some time immemorial. A sort of specter of the ongoing ecological disaster, the skeleton also mimics the ruins of the old fishing pontoons that surround it, and symbolizes the end of traditional activities and the depletion of underwater resources.

For Monumenta 2016, Huang Yong Ping is creating a huge immersive installation. The spectacular project consists of a colored architecture made up of eight islets overhung by a structure whose drop shadow mixes in its sense and shape with that of the metal ribs of the canopy. Taking a step back in the large central aisle, we embrace in this perspective, at a glance, the entire installation and the breadth of the Nave against which the artist measures himself.

This project is a symbolic landscape of today's economic world. Like the vapors which go up valleys in Chinese painting showing the permanent mutation of energies and substances, like the first industrial landscapes of the impressionists who presented the physical and optical effects of the transformation of the environment by the machine, Huang Yong Ping represents , inside this masterpiece of the industrial age that is the Grand Palais, the modification of the world, the metamorphoses of political and economic powers, the rise of new geographic regions, the decline of old empires and the provisional appearance of new candidates for power and the violence that these ambitions provoke. Strategies, tactics, politics, art and art of war, desire for power and wealth, ruins, birth or rebirth of societies: each of the countries, conglomerates, each of the multinationals which participate in the interminable successions of greatness and decadence wear, even for a few moments, an Empire.

Commissioner: Jean de Loisy, President of the Palais de Tokyo

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