USA, Cantor Arts Center - Stanford University, On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West, January -May 2005 Denmark, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Made in China: Works from the Estella Collection, March - August 2007, fig. 40 Jerusalem, Israel, The Israel Museum, Made in China: Contemporary Chinese Art at the Israel Museum, September 2007 - March 2008
Notes
MEMORANDUM "BAT PROJECT I, II AND III" The years between 2001 and 2003 marked a major transition for Chinese contemporary art and its larger milieu. As the Jiang Zemin era faded into the Hu Jintao presidency and the "Three Represents" redefined the People's Republic's understanding of its socialist principles, a new space opened for art and culture unlike anything that had existed in the post-Tian'anmen years of the 1990s. Artists like Huang Yong Ping, who had emigrated from China at the close of the 1980s in search of greater artistic freedom, were enticed to return to the mainland to take advantage of the opportunities it now presented for conceiving, producing, and exhibiting works on an unprecedented scale. Internationally, China had just been named host of the Beijing 2008 Olympiad and the Clinton era had given way to the contested Bush presidency. It was in this context that Huang Yong Ping's historic Bat Project began. On a plane back to his Paris home in April of 2001, he read a newspaper story about the U.S. Navy's EP-3 spy plane (nicknamed "the bat" by its crew members) which had been downed over Hainan Island in the South China Sea. The crew was detained for eleven days until a solution was negotiated whereby the plane would be cut into pieces and flown away inside another plane. Huang, with his absurdist sensibility evident as far back as his work with the Xiamen Dada group in the 1980s, found the irony of the "plane inside a plane" irresistible as a subject for a new work. And so he planned a massive sculpture?a 1:1 recreation of the fuselage and tail of that downed airplane?to be exhibited in Shenzhen at the annual sculpture exhibition of November 2001. Of course the events of September 11, 2001 intervened, turning any work about the U.S. and an airplane into a subject of immense sensitivity. Days before the Shenzhen exhibition was to open, Huang's work was censured by the French government (one of the exhibtion's underwriters) on the grounds that Huang himself was a French citizen. The sculpture was removed from its original site and not included in the exhibition. (Ironically, it today graces the lawn behind Shenzhen's major gallery area surrounding the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal museum.) Part II of the story and the work began six months later, when the Guangdong Museum of Art commissioned Huang to realize the sculpture "Bat Project II"?this time featuring the plane's cockpit and right wing?as a major new work for its First Guangzhou Triennial of Contemporary Art. That exhibition, to open on November 18 2002 and under the curation of Wu Hung, would mark the most significant and largest presentation to date of experimental Chinese art inside a state-owned museum. Huang's commission was one of fourteen outdoor works included in a part of the triennial entitled "Continuing the Experiment," a group that also included Ai Weiwei's first Chandelier sculpture and Wang Guangyi's original Believer sculptures. The Guangzhou Triennial came at an extremely sensitive moment in Chinese politics, opening just days after the 16υth Communist Party Congress closed and Hu Jintao was officially anointed as Jiang Zemin's successor. It was also during these same weeks that the U.S. pushed a resolution through the United Nations legitimizing its proposed invasion of Iraq. Somehow, Huang's Yong Ping's militant sculpture, this time shaped like a boomerang in what the artist called a reminder of how history repeats itself, was deemed too racy for the times. A still unknown combination of American and French diplomatic pressure led to a call from the Guangdong Province department of foreign affairs to the museum director's office, demanding that the work be removed before the opening. And so, like the "real" plane of which it was a faithful depiction, Huang's second Bat Project sculpture was cut into pieces and trucked off-site. One year later, at an exhibition sponsored by "Left Bank," a real-estate development in Beijing , Huang attempted to include the only remaining piece of the airplane which he had not recreated?its left wing. And, predictably, the sponsoring developer pulled this modest work from his exhibition upon learning of the project's sensitive history. Somewhat ironically, the first place where the Bat Project could be presented in its entirety was in the United States, at Huang Yong Ping's solo exhibition House of Oracles, which opened at the Walker Art Center in October 2005. (The exhibition later traveled to Mass MoCA, and is currently on view at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.) For this presentation entitled Bat Project IV, Huang salvaged the cockpit of an actual EP-3 plane from a California junkyard, then augmented it with a fuselage of bamboo wrapped in the red, white, and blue polyethylene cloth commonly seen on Chinese construction sites (its colors unintentionally picking up those of the U.S. flag). Inside the fuselage, Huang hung hundreds of taxidermic bats, symbols of fortune native to his home of Fujian province. The flight deck housed a documentary display charting the project's course. The present work Bat Project I, II, III: Memorandum (Lot 1146) was realized for Huang's participation in a landmark 2005 exhibition at Stanford curated by Britta Erickson and entitled On the Edge: Chinese Artists Encounter the West. Picking up formally on the appearance of a roll of film, it contains a selection of images and documents, which together offer a narrative of the long course of the Bat Project. This installation?like the small study for Pole of the East (Lot 1147)?fits into a sub-theme of the artist's oeuvre involving works based on other works. The visual device of the exposed roll of film points to the tense themes of surveillance, espionage, and documentation that underlay not only Huang's Bat Project but the historical events on which it was based.
