MCLC: art of Huang Yin

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: art of Huang Yin
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Source: Sinosphere blog, NYT (6/3/14):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/art-of-huang-yin-toys-with-c
oncept-of-a-lie/

Art of Huang Yin Toys With Concept of a Lie
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

Drops of sweat run down the comically exaggerated faces of the little boys
in the artist Huang Yin’s oil paintings. With slicked-back hair and red,
doll-like cheeks, they smoke, clutching full glasses of wine, their faces
creased in laughter.

But catch them alone in the series “Night,” and the boys — for they are
all boys, a quirk of the artist’s — are lost against a deep, black sky
that offers no approval for their falsity. In “Adult Gift,” a child,
simultaneously young and old, innocent and knowing, holds a white mask to
hide his true face. In China — though not just in China — children are
taught by their parents not to tell lies, and yet they grow into an adult
world that obliges them to lie to survive, said Ms. Huang, sitting at an
outdoor cafe in Beijing’s buzzy 798 arts district. The children in her art
have never grown up, she said.

“Everyone is a hao haizi, or a ‘good child’,” Ms. Huang, 42, said
sarcastically, referring to the figures that populate her exquisitely
detailed paintings and have become her trademark, but also to the many
Chinese strolling in the sunshine of an early June day.

“People are always acting and looking the same as other people,” she said.

“Because to show what they really have in their hearts is very dangerous.
It’s not possible to live without lies. You have to protect yourself. You
can’t stand out too much.”

Ms. Huang, born in the southern province of Sichuan, is best known for her
series “Fairy Tale Kingdom,” which depicts an era when lying was
effectively mandated by the state. It deals with the Great Leap Forward,
from 1958 to 1962, when Chinese leaders ordered farmers to increase
production at any cost, even sound farming practices. Famine ensued.
Millions starved to death.

In the background of the painting “Fairy Tale Kingdom: Changfeng She,”
named for an agricultural commune of the time, fertile fields of corn
wave, rainbows span the sky and the red characters of a slogan proclaim:
“However great the people’s courage, the earth can yield a matching crop.”

To illustrate the collective lie, Ms. Huang depicted her little boys,
dressed identically in blue trousers, white shirts and red neckerchiefs,
as Pinocchios with long, red-tipped noses.

A key goal of Ms. Huang’s art is to portray irrational thinking, a habit
that to this day sits deep in Chinese culture, writes the art critic Tong
Yujie.

“Born in the 1970s, Huang Yin didn’t experience the era when the absurd
values of the ‘Great Leap Forward’ were universal beliefs. But the
continuation of false and frantic concepts caused by irrational thinking
is strikingly consistent with the missing personal subjectivity of her
age, the post-Cultural Revolution era,” Ms. Tong wrote in “Spiritual
Object,” the title of the catalog from Ms. Huang’s recent exhibition at SZ
Art Center in the 798 complex.

“These beliefs have become part of the Chinese people’s behavior,” Ms.
Tong wrote.

In the decades following the Communist revolution there was only one right
answer to any question, Ms. Huang said.

“There was a correct answer, and it was a collective answer,” she said.

In important ways that is still the case, but there is also some real
change today. Many people find that anxiety-inducing.

“They are sweating because they are afraid,” she said of her figures.

Recently, the Pinocchio figures of the “Fairytale Kingdom” series have
been succeeded by less obviously symbolic child-adults, who keep their
burnished hair but lose the red scarf, a symbol of the Communist Young
Pioneers, and the elongated, lying noses.

The result is works like the eerie “People Moving in the Wind,” where
sweat trickles off a wall on which the figures clamber, and “Cupid
Confused About His Identity and in an Awkward Situation,” an unsettling
examination of love where Cupid’s shadow turns to shoot a pair of coupling
butterflies while Cupid himself stands stiffly, eyes swiveling to watch
but not seeing.

“She doesn’t want her art to be too symbolic, but to excavate the
mysteries of humanity and the cultural gene hidden in the images of these
little boys,” Wang Mingxian, a curator and the deputy director of the
Architectural Research Center at the Chinese National Academy of Arts,
wrote in the catalog.

For Mr. Wang, there is much humor in the works, and a new freedom of
thought as the artist plays with the concept of the lie. And yet, the
sweat still pours and the children still have not grown up, suggesting
that things change, but some things stay the same.

“You can’t say things that are too expressive of yourself,” Ms. Huang
said. “And that’s both a cultural and a political thing.”