Empires

Strategies, politics, art and the art of war, the desire for power, ruins, the birth or rebirth of societies: Huang Yong Ping goes through the new Empires at this year’s Monumenta in Paris.

Since 2007, Monumenta has invited an artist with an international reputation to take over the Nave of the Grand Palais, an immense 13,500 sqm glass dome, and 35 metres high. This year’s protagonist is Chinese artist Huang Yong Pin, a major figure of the avant-garde of 1980s in China. Monumenta 2016 is curated by Jean de Loisy, president of the Palais de Tokyo.

For Monumenta 2016, Huang Yong Ping will create an immense immersive installation. The spectacular project consists of a colourful architecture of eight islands, over which looms a structure whose drop shadow, through both its direction and its form, combines with that of the metal skeleton of the glass dome. Standing back in the central Grande Allée, this perspective allows visitors to fully appreciate the entire installation and the scale of the Nave, which the artist is taking on.

This project is a symbolic landscape of today’s economic world. Like the smog rising out of the valleys in Chinese painting highlighting the permanent mutation of energy and substances, Huang Yong Ping uses a masterpiece of the industrial as a vehicle to represent the modification of the world, the metamorphoses of political and economic powers, the ascension and new geographical regions, the decline of ancient empires and the provisional apparition of new candidates for power – as well as the violence that such ambition can cause.