Chinese Artist’s Exhibit Closed for Cruelty
A live-animal art installation by internationally renown Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping was closed Sunday as animal rights groups deemed the exhibit cruel. The “Theater of the World” exhibit, on display at the Vancouver Art Gallery, featured several live animals such as scorpions, tarantulas, crickets and lizards together in a small cage without sufficient light or food. The British Columbia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals demanded last week that the exhibit be drastically altered or shut down saying, “People were concerned about different species coexisting in that habitat…they are species from different parts of the world that would not normally be with each other.” Huang (pictured right) believed the exhibit was purely artistic and conveyed to the viewer the element of chance and the imminence of death. The Chinese have never been accused of being champions of animal rights. As the AFP reported Sunday from Vancouver, “a fierce fight over animal rights and artistic freedom immediately broke out in this western Canadian metropolis, where the VAG is the premier public gallery.” The VAG? The Vancouver Art Gallery calls itself the “VAG?” Do Vancouverites go around asking, “is there a new exhibit in the VAG?” Or “Is the VAG undergoing renovations?” Or “Is the VAG open on Mondays?” The exhibit was part of a larger show titled “House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective” which was previously shown in Minneapolis and Massachusetts without any controversy. In a press release last week, Huang said critics of the exhibit “completely ignored the concept and ideology behind this particular art work, citing instead the doctrines of so-called ‘animal rights’ that violently interfere with the rights of an art work to be freely exhibited in an art museum.” Clearly, the VAG gave in amidst mounting outside pressure. Perhaps in the future, artists will have to think twice before putting live animals on display in Canada’s VAG.
•AFP: Live-Animal Sculpture by Chinese-F