"Is art also a form of 'medicine'?" Contesting classifications in Huang Yong Ping's art installations

Huang Yong Ping (黄永砯, b.1954 ˗ d.2019) sought, in his artworks, to criticize the art institution and to deconstruct dogmas concerning official art and art history in order to reform and democratize Chinese contemporary art. This often took the form of contesting established systems, orders and classifications through the use of divination, prophecy, chance and gambling. In the late 1980s, he shifted his practice to installation and performance art because the medium of painting failed to represent the realities of life adequately. This realisation marked the end, or ‘death’, of painting as his predominant artistic practice and Huang’s immigration to Paris in 1989 reinforced this transition to conceptual art. The objective of this article is to explore three installations – 108 Cards, The Pharmacy and Indigestible Object – created in the ‘second stage’ of his life which engage in both form and meaning with imagery and theories relating to health, medicine and healing. They amalgamate Eastern principles, materials, and objects with Western references to overturn conventional classifications of East and West and medicine and art. Significantly, we offer a new contribution to studies of the artist by way of an understanding of Huang’s role as a doctor, associated closely with his roles as artist and diviner, and we examine his belief in the potential for art to be medicine. This is possible after the language used by artists to talk about art has been purged of fruitless art historical discourses and restrictive socialist-realist ideology. We also consider the importance Huang attributes to Chinese medical history, primarily how it produces spatiotemporal incongruities and even humour when received by a contemporary Chinese audience and a foreign public. This disruption of expectations extends beyond medical objects and images to art institutions themselves. Thus, we investigate, lastly, the link between foodstuffs and medicine, which entails bringing ‘non-art’ objects into exhibition spaces. Not usually associated with traditional art history or medical history, such mundane objects serve to question the artefacts valued by art institutions, thus further demonstrating Huang’s contestation of classifications and conventions.