cover your eyes

The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes is a work of art from 1987 (fig. 4). Huang Yong Ping used two art history books—Wang Bomin’s History of Chinese Painting and Herbert Read’s A Concise History of Modern Painting—as the raw material for this work (the latter being one of the few introductory modern Western art books to be translated into Chinese, and one that at the time had an enormous influence in avant-garde art circles). He put the two books through a two-minute wash cycle in his washing machine at home and afterward placed the pulplike remains atop a wooden box. Using this instantaneous method, his work provided a Chan answer to a significant cultural question: the mutual influence between the two cultures does not follow any method, logic, concept, or ethics, but is achieved in an uninterrupted instant. It is not about replacing one tradition with another, but rather about two cultures chaotically overlapping after their original structures have been pulverized. Based on what Huang Yong Ping himself has said, since the basic concept of cultural history has continually been “sullied,” it must therefore continually be washed and dried. The purpose of washing and drying is not to make this concept purer, however, but rather to make it “dirtier.” Only when there is no pure culture can “dirty” culture become more vivacious and wide-ranging.

This piece by Huang Yong Ping used simple and crude raw materials to complete a Chan revolution within two minutes. With its muted attitude, it evades any linguistic entrapment, addressing the issues at hand in a most succinct manner. In my opinion, it is not only a milestone in contemporary Chinese art but also a rare international contemporary art masterpiece.

In a series of works made since 1987, Huang Yong Ping has often used this approach of washing books and literature. The major works of this series include, in 1988, his washing of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Book Cabinet; in 1989, Reptile, created for the exhibition Magiciens de la terre (fig. 10); in 1991, Should We Construct Another Cathedral? in Frankfurt (fig. 11) and Unreadable Humidity for the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (fig. 12), as well as, in 1992, The House of Oracles at Galerie Froment & Putman, Paris, and Library Canteen for the exhibition Parcours privés in Paris (fig. 13). These works all represent the ongoing development of this approach.