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Huang Yong Ping
Until Sep 21
This event has finished
Barbican Centre, Silk St, London, EC2Y 8DS
Rating:
By JJ Charlesworth

Posted: Tue Aug 19
Anxieties about China’s rising power have translated into a lot of high-horse China-bashing about human rights and supposedly reckless economic growth. On the other hand, you can’t move for well meaning, China-based ‘let’s get to know you’ cultural initiatives. In this context, art and politics are bound to collide, and Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping’s art doesn’t pull any punches. Drawing on the nineteenth-century opium wars, Huang presents an installation of what amounts to scaled-up drug paraphernalia, hitting you with a big dose of political irony.

The opium wars were one of the more despicable episodes in the British Empire. A growing trade deficit with Qing China led British administrators to the novel solution of selling opium to the Chinese, a policy which quickly led to a huge addict trade – hey presto, deficit solved. Huang’s austere installation is a surreal procession of traditional Chinese opium-den implements – needles and bowls – before one turns the corner to find an aluminium statue of British foreign minister Lord Palmerston, toppled flat and apparently toking from a giant opium pipe. Beyond is a huge timber rack full of outsized aromatic opium-like balls.

It’s not exactly subtle, yet what we’re meant to make of it isn’t clear. In case you’re stuck for an opinion, the Barbican’s preachy gallery text declares that the exhibition highlights ‘the destructive forces of increasing globalisation and the negative effects of an unchecked free market economy’. This is drivel, but Huang’s show raises questions without offering answers, and it’s worth the visit just to ponder what ours might be.