The end of the world: Huang Yong Ping’s intermedial art installations

From 1987 to 1994, a period that overlapped with his move to France in 1989, Huang Yong Ping washed texts in washing machines as part of his ‘damp method’ series. His objective was to ‘cut off the tongue’ by destroying certain classics, while at the same time ‘nurtur[ing] the tongue’ by turning to other classics. This paradoxical strategy epitomises his practice and philosophy of art which privileges creation through destruction and showing over describing by questioning the possibilities of communication, whether within or across cultures. This article analyses three of Huang’s artworks that are inspired by texts (books, journals, newspapers, scripture) and their relationship to water and endings, whether linguistic, material, metaphysical, aesthetic or ecological. It focuses on his transformation of two-dimensional texts into three-dimensional structures which draws attention to the mediation of culture and knowledge. It also considers how these artworks resonate with Arne Næss’s concept of deep ecology and their correspondences with Bruno Latour’s concept of modes of existence, those networks of associations in which human and nonhuman entities are actors with agency in the processes of redistribution.