As in all the works of Huang Yong Ping, time plays an important role in his drawings, oscillating between objects and processes. Another recurrent aspect is the presence of animals, as in the work for the evn collection, in which there are turtles that were inspired by his work at the Vienna Secession during Cities on the Move in 1997.

These animals never present themselves as simply animal in nature, but rather as anonymous actors who play the scenes of conflict. Ping explained to me that his use of animals is a chinese take on the metaphor, which he considers as a process, in which the meaning constantly changes and expands. In his more recent work, Huang Yong Ping often studies the question of the local and the global, the idea of perhaps less “belonging” to a geography, but being “between” geographies, as Simryn Gill once put it. Many of the transitory installations of Ping are related to travelling. As Huang Yong Ping recently told me, it is less a question of a fixed locality but of mobility; in the artists own words it is “apporter avec soi sa terre et son eau” [to carry with yourself your earth and your water].

Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)