Huang Yong Ping - Contemporary Art London Friday, October 13, 2006 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Art & Public, Geneva

  • Catalogue Essay

    “The fact that I, as a Chinese person was to be in London in 1997 already set the basic tone for this project, because July 1997 marked the end of the British control of Hong Kong. It was within this context that I developed my ideas for this project. In this installation, I made five porcelain rice bowls enlarged to an enormous scale (150 centimeters wide and 80 centimeters high), and decorated them with motifs from the nineteenth century Western china produced by the British East India Company. What interested me was how the ‘porcelain bowl’ as a traditional Chinese object (something exotic) had been totally turned into a Western discourse via these Western Motifs of the British East India Company. These bowls look like hemispheres and are decorated with the images of the flags of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States and so on. Within such an ‘oriental’ landscape they give the impression of the world being wrapped up by Western forces and reflect the imagination and myth of colonialism in the nineteenth century – that is, as a peaceful era in the Orient under the protection of the colonizers. The bowl is also a vessel used for holding food. I filled these enormous bowls with all sorts of British foodstuffs – water, drinks, seasoning, biscuits, snacks and dairy products – all stamped with the best-before date of July1, 1997, as a reference to the end of the colonialist bowl and the arrival of July 1, 1997, as the doomsday for the myth of colonialism.” (H.Yong Ping, taken from V. Philippe, House of Oracles: a Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, Minneapolis, 2005, p. 45)

14

Le Jugement Dernier

1997
Fiberglass bowl with oil paint and expired food products.
30 3/4 x 55 1/2 x 55 1/2 in. (78.1 x 141 x 141 cm).

Estimate
£40,000 - 60,000 

Sold for £60,000

Contemporary Art

14 Oct 2006, 7pm
London