Huang Yong Ping

The installation Devons-nous encore construire une grande cathédrale? presented at the Fondation Cartier creates a dialogue between a table and stools covered in books that have been torn up and reduced to a pulp, and a photograph showing Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Janis Kounellis and Enzo Cucchi at a conference that took place behind closed doors in Basel in June and October 1985, hosted by Jean-Christophe Ammann.

A confrontation between two German artists and two artists from the Mediterranean, this discussion reproduced in the book Let Us Build a Cathedral focuses on the tragedy of 20th century European cultural history. The book had a profound effect on Huang Yon Ping, who published excerpts from it in a Chinese magazine, and it appears here as the substance from which an artwork can be born. What remains of the 1985 conversation – the French and German versions have been reduced to pulp – is laid on the table.

The position occupied by each artists is signified by something he wrote, pulped and laid on a stool: the different thoughts, arguments or writings of each artist are reduced to the same state. The installation symbolically addresses what remains after the 1985 debate and embodies the oracle Huang Yong Ping discovered in the I Ching in February 1991: “a bird that flies away leaves its cry behind”.