Image courtesy of Grand Palais, the Nave

Monumenta 2016. Huang Yong Ping

Since 2007, internationally renowned contemporary artists have been filling the Nave of the Grand Palais with masterful works designed for the occasion. After Anselm Kiefer, Richard Serra, Christian Boltanski, Anish Kapoor, Daniel Buren and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Huang Yong Ping, the true founder of contemporary art in China, who now lives and works in France, takes up the challenge in 2016.

Image courtesy of Grand Palais, the Nave

Over a period of twenty years, Huang Yong Ping has explored the major issues of our time – conflict, economics, religion, nature – in works that have often been likened to philosophical fables. Empires is an installation especially developed for Monumenta. It forms a landscape, made up of eight mounds of freight containers,a metal snake suspended from a crane that unfurls like mist between mountains, and a bicorne hat set on an arch directly inspired by the one worn by Napoleon at the Battle of Eylau.

Image courtesy of Grand Palais, the Nave

The containers evoke globalization, as vehicles for the circulation of wealth. The bicorne evokes the endless power struggles that drive the world and all the industrialists, politicians, military men and tyrants who long to wear that famous hat. The snake slithering over the work, mouth wide open, appears to jeopardize the ambition of these powers, while the loop that it forms symbolizes the infinite nature of this cycle of glory and destruction.

Image courtesy of Grand Palais, the Nave

The composition of Empires echoes the structure of the nave and its iron arches, late testaments to the profound transformations brought about by the industrial revolution. Just as certain Impressionists did before him, the artist describes a present-day economic landscape, while showing, from a non-judgemental perspective, how modern times obey the same laws as the empires before them, ineluctably governed by the same patterns of expansion and decadence.

Grand Palais, the Nave
From May 08 2016, to  June 18, 2016

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