Kath Blair's Profile

ayout and design of print publications and special projects

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It is neither object nor subject; the abject is situated, rather,
at a place before we entered into the symbolic
order.

The abject thus at once represents the threat that meaning is breaking
down and constitutes our reaction to such a breakdown: a reestablishment
of our "primal repression."

The relationship that I have entertained with Huang Yong Ping’s work over the last decade seems to follow such a nonpattern. I would even say, at the risk of troubling the artist, that from the get-go nothing was in place for the two of us to meet. I write this not with the intent to criticize or offend, but rather in an effort to express how much Huang’s work has brought to my understanding of art as an aesthetic storm, a storm that is the image of the important shifts in aesthetic and theory that have fed the field of art history, its narratives and discourses, over the last twenty years, leaving it baffled. Far from a mea culpa, such a statement, and ultimately the essay that follows, is an attempt to shed light on how Huang’s work, his attitude and methodology, can be perceived as an aesthetic revolution, a quiet but radical one.

Then, a few years later, the Walker brought into its collection The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes (1987/1993), an early work by the artist that in many ways stands as a programmatic piece, a piece that defined at an early stage of his career his aesthetic attitude and philosophy, a piece that so far stands as a matrix for his work and, consequently, as a matrix for this exhibition

(b) Apart from clear cases of cheating, the analysis yields real results—what Ettelson finds is actually there, in the words where he finds it. We are no longer dealing with the facility of arbitrary pronouncements, as was the case with the symbolic device—the ‘Satan’ anagram is not hallucinated by Ettelson.

This dedication is bound to remind the reader of the anecdote of the little girl holding an orange in her left hand which, Carroll claims, is the origin of Through the Looking-Glass. (The puzzle is: why does the little girl hold an orange in her left hand, whereas her mirror image holds it in her right hand?) This intertextual reference, whether it is deliberate or not on Ettelson’s part, is food for thought. It is clear that his intuition is not merely demented, but also faithful to Carroll.

The second cause of the national reawakening was undoubtedly that portentous danger with which Western encroachments on Asiatic soil threatened our national independence.

Art, to be fully
appreciated, must be true to contemporaneous life. It is not that we
should ignore the claims of posterity, but that we should seek to enjoy
the present more. It is not that we should disregard the creations
of the past, but that we should try to assimilate them into our
consciousness. Slavish conformity to traditions and formulas fetters the
expression of individuality in architecture. We can but weep over the
senseless imitations of European buildings which one beholds in modern
Japan. We marvel why, among the most progressive Western nations,
architecture should be so devoid of originality, so replete with
repetitions of obsolete styles. Perhaps we are passing through an age of
democratisation in art, while awaiting the rise of some princely master
who shall establish a new dynasty. Would that we loved the ancients
more and copied them less! It has been said that the Greeks were great
because they never drew from the antique.