Culture

Abundant diversity

By Han Bingbin (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-03-21 08:03

Huang Zhi-yang in his studio says that sometimes even the artist doesn't know what the work means. Photos provided to China Daily

Huang Zhi-yang discovers his "edge effect" in the energetic uncertainties and cultural crossovers of Beijing, Han Bingbin discovers.

Never have the country's bamboos swayed and swirled so much from their traditional image of upright seclusion into the twisted chaos created by artist Huang Zhi-yang, with a whole room of swirling and stretching bamboo branches that left many viewers in confusion. However, Huang said it's not his style to painstakingly explain the intention of design.

"Let them feel for themselves," he said. "Every viewer has the right to interpret each piece of art work in his own way. Sometimes artists themselves don't even know what they are doing."

Still, with a finger and a bottle of ink, the artist wrote a hint on the wall. His one-sentence clue: The internal spontaneous combustion of a bamboo mountain, which is also the title of the exhibition.

However, in a previous newsletter, Huang was a little more forthcoming and explained the theme more clearly saying the installation was a reflection of humanity's physical and spiritual changes inspired by nature.

"Through the conflicts among different energies and species, I thought about the conflicts among different cultures and nations. So, I expressed my own understanding of the state of the world in the form of art," he said.

The desire to create something based on natural changes was an idea he had nurtured for the last decade, but he did not have a concrete idea until one day a friend of his from Anji in Zhejiang province told him about the bamboo in the area.

"The pliable yet tough bamboo branches suddenly showed me what I wanted to do," he said.

The Taiwan artist first rendered his idea on paper: a ball of smooth lines that looked like the random scratches in Chinese calligraphy, an art that Huang has been practicing since he was young. One month later, after eight workers had painstakingly roasted and bent a pile of bamboo branches transported from Anji, the installation was born.

The work will be on display for one and a half months in 798 Art Zone. Then the installation will be torn down and moved away.

"That's why I love installations. I have completed different forms of art, but what people talk to me most frequently about are my installations, many of which don't exist any more. They surely have a stronger artistic impact," he said.

However, one of Huang's installations - a group of stone sculptures, exploring the relationship between human and nature, called Possessing Numerous Peaks - had a longer life than he expected as it was selected for permanent display at the Sun Valley of the Shanghai 2010 World Expo.

Born in Taipei in 1965, Huang graduated from the Chinese Culture University in Taiwan. He found fame with his profound Chinese cultural details that are often embodied in his paintings and other forms of art creation, which he said represent his awareness of the "unity of heaven and men", a core idea in Taoism.

Such elegant aesthetics have not only made Huang a favorite of art collectors, but also a muse for fashion designers.

Not long ago, when French designer Anne Valerie Hash rolled out her latest collection on the runway of Paris Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2011, viewers could catch a hint of Oriental philosophy from the flowing sculptural outlines of the clothes. Hash later told Vogue China that the rich colors and soft lines that Huang had scattered on a drawing board constituted a world of mystery, which summoned up images like purple thunder and exuberant forests in her mind.

"She's very smart and sensitive. Actually we didn't communicate that much in the process. I just gave her a collection of my art creations and she definitely touched the core of my original intentions," said Huang.

Huang said collaborating with fashion designers shortens the distance between art and common people. The collaboration provided a chance, he added, to confront the needs of customers, which is a realistic job that fashion does.

More importantly, the crossover has placed him in a merging area between different cultures and fields. Only in that area can he acquire a feeling of uncertainty and freshness that will provide him a rich source of unstoppable inspirations, he said.

He calls it an "edge effect", a state of mind that creates "diversity and abundance".

In the pursuit of that ideal state, Huang has drifted among different places. Maturing into an accomplished artist in Taiwan, one peak of Huang's career came in 1995 when he held his first exhibition, called Lover's Library, at La Biennale di Venezia.

In 1996, he moved to New York where his exposure to the multi-cultural environment later evolved into a collection with a zen-like theme called Three Marks.

Ten years later, he came to Beijing, a city he now sees as his long-term base. The city has witnessed an explosion of his creativity in the past few years, including the Bio-Beijing, Dreamscape and Auspicious Beast series among others.

"Beijing is such an energetic place. It has inspired me a lot. But I am very self-contained, so the way I seek inspiration here is mainly through meditation and introspection," Huang said.

The Internal Spontaneous Combustion of a Bamboo Mountain.