Pioneering Chinese-born artists Huang Yong Pingand Shen Yuan find a global audience

Media tours at the Vancouver Art Gallery are usually quiet and unhurried events, but not today. Today, a crowd of excited critics, reporters, and cameramen is being jogged through Huang Yong Ping's spectacular and politically charged exhibition House of Oracles, with its complex and often irreverent readings of history, current events, and the workings of power and authority.

With athletic speed we pass a crumbling replica of a bank building made of some 20,000 kilograms of sand and cement; an enormous serpent skeleton carved out of wood, hanging from the ceiling and running from one end of a second-floor gallery to the other; the cockpit of an American spy plane draped with stuffed bats and striped fabric; a life-size sculpture of an elephant with a tiger scrambling into a basketlike carrier on its back; and a turtle-shaped cage containing live reptiles and poisonous insects.

Following the tour, we're directed into a series of tightly scheduled interviews. Is it possible to examine, in 10 minutes and through translator April Liu, the essential themes of the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Friedrich Nietzsche, along with the teachings of Taoism and Zen Buddhism, all early and important influences on Huang's art? "I was interested in a very broad range of philosophy," Huang says of his self-directed studies. "However, I must emphasize that I am not a philosopher and I approached it as an outsider." Still, he adds, "I believe it's very important that we expand beyond our horizons."

The persistence of other early influences, such as the work of Marcel Duchamp, also arises in our conversation. "If you take the spirit of Dada, which is to challenge and to question, this is always an element [in my art]", Huang says. And then an event organizer looms as if carrying a stopwatch, urging us to move along, move right along. It's the kind of rapid-fire regimen that usually characterizes the promotion of big-budget American movies featuring big-budget American movie stars. Something, it seems, is up, way up–and that something is the profile of contemporary Chinese art, which is drawing a lot of media scrutiny lately, mostly because of the huge splash it's making in international art markets. Expanding acquisitions and soaring prices are now associated with art that western curators and critics have been focusing on for over a decade.

In the context of House of Oracles, it's contemporary expatriate Chinese art that's commanding attention. The Paris-based Huang is being honoured by this mid-career retrospective, organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and on view at the VAG until September 16. Concurrently, his wife, the artist Shen Yuan, has opened an exhibition of four mixed-media installations at Vancouver's Centre A, the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, running until May 5. (The VAG and Centre A are collaborating on media events and public programming for the two exhibitions, and both Huang and Shen are present here for interviews.) Although Shen, like Huang, works in mixed-media installation, her art is more obviously directed at issues of identity. Speaking through translator Debra Zho, Shen says, "My work is tightly related to my personal experience as a female artist living overseas." Gender, cultural displacement, language, poverty, privilege, and racial profiling all emerge as themes in her current installations–which include a life-size sculpture of a car that opens to display a multitude of pockets, and nine big tongues, cast in ice, that melt to reveal jagged kitchen knives.

Both artists were born in China in the 1950s, studied traditional painting techniques there, and, in the 1980s, went through what observers have seen as their own kind of cultural revolution, rapidly assimilating the past century of western art. Huang and Shen were at the forefront of Chinese avant-garde activities, many of them censored by the authorities, while living in Huang's native city of Xiamen in the 1980s. In 1989 and 1990, respectively, Huang and Shen moved to France, where they have since forged their individual careers.

Curators point to the globalized nature of their art, which, in both form and content, transcends stereotypical oppositions of East and West. Still, there's no denying that their Vancouver shows are taking place within a climate of extreme interest and investment in all things Chinese. Centre A's founding director, Hank Bull, says it's not just western buyers who are driving the boom; it's newly prosperous Asian and, in some cases, South American collectors. "The art market has gone global in a big way."

In explaining why contemporary art from China is such a hot commodity, Bull observes that the level of technical accomplishment among emerging artists in that country is very high. "Every year, there are thousands and thousands of kids trying to get into art school. To get into first year, they already have to be able to draw like Michelangelo." He cites not only the postwar history of social-realist art, which demanded a certain facility of execution, but more importantly, an ancient, underlying visual culture, including the oldest continuous painting tradition in the world. "Chinese artists have a tremendous amount of cultural capital behind them as they go forward, and they're now in the world's most booming economy," he says. "They're at the front end of contemporary economic, technological, and cultural developments in what is arguably the richest country in the world."

The problem in all of this, Bull observes, is that the market has become overheated. Young artists are seduced by the possibilities of acquiring considerable wealth. "They're cranking out work for the market and quality is now suffering. A very unhealthy atmosphere has been created." He quickly adds, however, that Huang and Shen and others from the original wave of Chinese avant-gardists have remained distant from the "bubble", and are in many ways critical of it.

In this ongoing discussion, Walker Center curators Philippe Vergne and Doryun Chong, also present at the VAG, caution against identifying Huang as Chinese. "He is a French citizen," says Vergne, who also hails from France. "Through all his work, he's been trying to dismantle this kind of classification, this kind of holding a flag above his work." He quotes Huang as saying that borders and notions of national identity are irrelevant. Still, Vergne says, "Huang Yong Ping and his generation, with their international visibility, have opened the door to a totally different way of making art in China." It was necessary, he suggests, for them to leave China when they did, and to develop their art on the world stage, in order for their radical experiments to forge change in their homeland.

"The history of contemporary Chinese art would start around 1980," says Chong, "and Huang is one of its forefathers." He gestures toward concept-based artworks that Huang executed in China in the 1980s. "These are now historical works that are considered very important, and all the younger artists in China would know them by heart."

Chong cites Huang as believing that his art is complete only when an audience responds to it, then notes that when Huang's retrospective travels to Beijing in the fall of 2008, it will undoubtedly provoke different reactions from those in Vancouver or Minneapolis. In China, Chong supposes, Huang's early work will have a more "trenchant" significance. "The contribution this exhibition makes is quite important for emerging work in China," he adds. "It solidifies it."