Huang Yong Ping at Jack Tilton - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

A handful of crusty little dark brown balls, assemblageed on the floor, was the exordium to Huang Yong Ping's The Pharmacy (1995) as installed at Tilton. The turdlike particulars seemed to have issued from the narrow neck of a big, bulbous, waspwaisted made of wood structure wedged into the gallery's main space; its shape was derived from the gourds that one time served Taoist priests as medicine bags. The considerable formal interest of this thing -- no less compelling than, say, Richard Deacon's similarly eccentric, well-carpentered abstractions -- make go rounded out to be a secondary matter. From the rear of the form a wide opening revealed a kind of Eastern-accented survivalist bin A bare bulb illuminated scanty provisions arranged upon interior wooden ribs which created makeshift shelves. Ceramic and glass goblets mason jars and a cylindrical metal cage held unidentified dusts and potions.

Suggestions of the one and the other sanctuary and interrogation chamber were supported by the agency of the installation's other components. upon the floor behind the giant gourd was a tidy array of natural elements: lizard skins and snakeskins, pulverulent orange rocks, a scorpion, turtle-pigeon shells, bones. Occasional labels were in Chinese; there were a small in number ratty plastic bags and stacks of flimsy made of wood crates. Exotic and impoverished in equal measure, this unpretending buffet of Asian balms was tendered as counterpoint to a solitary made of wood chair which stood by itself, miscreant-style, in an opposite corner. Lashed to the chair's back with wide leather straps were sum of two units warped plywood boards, each framing the working surface of an electric iron. An irregular circle of brown wax at the center of the pair irons evoked burnt skin; an association with torture was inescapable.

Additional works in the display included a cycle of blurry bannerlike black-and-white photostats alternating images of Western art works and historical photographs, with labels describing improbable antidotes (involving elephant skin, flies, vomit) from a 16th-century Chinese pharmacological dictionary. These photostats shared the gallery's back sweep with a prone figure assembled from of advanced age blue jeans and tropical tree stems Completing the exhibition was a trio of clever drawings that elaborated on the gourd form, transforming it into a woman's torso, a cosmology and an eyeball. The drawings were a kind of grace note to the installation's opening measure (those little turd that ballooning made of wood body), which had effectively introduced its theme. Huang Yong Ping present the appearances to feel that the popular Western notion of the Third World artist as shamanistic medicine man is a laughable cliche. on the other hand the joke cuts two ways, echoing ignorance and cruelties -- abuse of authority, wanton infliction of pain in the name of physical or social melioration -- that have a high opinion of no national boundaries.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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