HUANG XUEBIN
Starting from the 353rd digit “9” after the decimal point of π (3.14159…), the sequence “98763…95141.3” is reversed and turned into a film: the opening title is “9876…” and the ending is “95141.3”. The playback speed shifts gradually; only after the entire “film” ends can the audience trace back to this hyper-object through experience.
QR codes of websites with contaminated IP addresses, printed on thermal paper. After Genesis 11: people unite to build a tower reaching unto heaven; the LORD confounds their language so that nothing they imagine to do shall be restrained from them.
A modified electronic game coin-sending device ejects one 1-yuan coin every 2 minutes. Operating eight hours a day, the total after a month equals one month’s salary. Work is what you do plus one.
In Hainan one sees leaning, curved coconut trees — locally called “crooked-necked” or “bent” coconut trees — owing to their phototropism toward the more luminous sea. Western plant hunters listed the coconut tree as a core element of “tropical paradise” as early as the 19th century. Hainan was established as a province in 1988 and the image of the bent coconut tree began to circulate as a visual sign of tropical leisure: travel agencies, real estate developments, hair salons, pharmacies, auto-repair shops. Following Baudrillard, this becomes a simulacrum that no longer points to reality but only to itself. Today in Haikou the bent coconut tree appears on distribution boxes for the city power grid and on fiber-optic transformer cabinets, repeated across the urban surface. Through this appropriation Hainan Island is represented as a tropical coastal destination, transformed from “the end of the world” into “an international tourist island.” In the cartoon film series McDull’s Story (illustrated by Mak Ka-pi, written by Tse Li-wen), the little pig McDull dreams of going to the Maldives — of clear water and white sand. His mother takes him on a “trip to the Maldives” that turns out to be an amusement park of tropical landscapes: the cable car as airplane, the marine pavilion as the Indian Ocean. McDull’s biggest dream is realized.
CV
Selected Group Exhibitions
About
Huang Xuebin was born in Wenchang, Hainan in 1979 and currently lives in Haikou. In his artistic practice every object is regarded as an “experience equation” to be deconstructed and reconstructed.
Through art as a sensorial form, he connects the object to a broader experience of social existence. The making of each work is a process of establishing relations within a specific context — involving language, medium, space, and the viewer’s field of experience. He does not seek a fixed “solution,” but allows the sensorial qualities of the object to be gradually activated.