Long Scroll

A leading figure in the radical art collective Xiamen Dada during the 1980s, Huang has relentlessly challenged notions of art, geopolitics, and the viability of cultural interchange through his conceptual installations, many of which are documented in Long Scroll, a remarkable visual record of his artistic output from 1985 to 2001. Adopting the traditional handscroll format, the painting consists of images of these installations drawn in pencil and tinted with a simple palette of orange and blue watercolors. Huang’s photography-based drawings are juxtaposed without regard for chronology or scale and include a fortune-telling device the artist used to automatize the process of painting and an American spy plane that collided with a Chinese fighter jet—a cultural collision of sorts that inspired Huang’s highly controversial Bat Project (2001–5). Besides referencing his own works, Huang also illuminates connections to important influences for him such as Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), a key figure of the twentieth-century avant-garde, and Chan Buddhism.