Monumenta 2016. Empires, Huang Yong Ping

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.

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.

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.

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 mpressionists
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.