"Frolic" into the dark side of drugs, smuggling, and globalization with Huang Yong Ping's first UK solo exhibition at The Curve, Barbican Art Gallery, London. Pamela Yau reports.

Hollywood's glamorization of the bygone era of opium dens, visions of red-tinged hazy smoked filled rooms, can cloud visitors' expectations before viewing Chinese contemporary artist Huang Yong Ping's Frolic. In his first solo UK art exhibition, Huang focuses on the Opium War in this newly created art installation, now showing at The Curve, Barbican Art Gallery.

But on entering the exhibition from either side of the unique serpentine-like art space of The Curve, all assumptions and presumptions are wiped away by Huang's work as it stands on its own in its powerful commentary on China, international relations and globalization in today's world.

 Since his establishment of the influential avant-garde Xiamen Dada art group in China in the 1980s, Huang Yong Ping has become one of the most important Chinese contemporary artists of his time. Although he is now based out of Paris, France, China continues to be an important subject in his art, as it is in Frolic. Huang's art not only offers insight into the complicated past of China and its relations with other nations, but also its developing present and its much debated future in this continuing globalizing world.

Curator Lydia Yee points out Huang's emphasis in Frolic on the colliding of two worlds in the exhibition, the production and consumption sides of the opium trade, which Huang has stated he believes is a "forerunner for today's globalization: melding trade and the expansion of power".  The Opium War, which rocked China in the 19^th Century and created repercussions between China-Great Britain relations carrying over all the way to the 20^th century, serves as the perfect subject to examine what may be at times the parasitic relationships between countries such as the modern day oil trade.

Size, scale and placement play important roles in the exhibition as it is used by Huang throughout Frolic to great effect. On the consumption side of the exhibition, the viewer walks through a hall of oversized opium needles and drug paraphernalia, a display which showcases the ritualistic and fetishistic nature of the use of opium.

The exaggeration of these instruments of drug use provokes the visitor to consider the items and products in his life that one gives so much meaning and power to from mobile phones to the internet, effectively making countless individuals slaves to the information age.

At the other end of the exhibition is the production side of opium, the scales, the boxes, and the large concrete balls representing drying opium balls. Again size and scale is used by Huang to awaken the viewers wonder and invoke a realization of the weight of the subject matter, a weight which is made ever more evident as one walks through the timber frame of a drying rack, which is holding up hundreds of heavy concrete opium balls right above one's head.

Production and consumption collide in the middle of the installation, as Huang puts on full display a toppled figure of Lord Palmerston, former British foreign secretary and Prime Minister, on an opium bed.  Smoking a massive stone opium pipe, Palmerston, who is believed to have provoked the Opium Wars, is shown indulging in this drug that made for lucrative trade between the nations.

China would later try to limit the importation of opium because of rampant drug use, as British and even foreign freelance companies continued to smuggle the drug into China. The exhibition, Frolic, is in fact named after the boat belonging to the Boston-based Augustine Heard & Co, a freelance company which was involved in opium trafficking.

Because of the curved space of the gallery, at no one point can a visitor see the entire installation and this element is used to its fullest effect by Huang. In fact, the exhibition itself was specifically designed for the Curve, which seemingly wraps around the back interior of the Barbican Centre.

The Curve not only challenges but also inspires artists to embrace its potential as Huang has with Frolic, showing through his work that The Curve is not only a space to present art but can effectively become an essential part of the art itself. 

Yee hopes that visitors to Frolic will be inspired by Huang's piece and feel compelled to learn more about the range of issues explored in the exhibition. Frolic serves as a unique mixture of art, history, and controversy that makes one wonder whether or society has learned from the lessons of the past as it heads into the increasingly globalized and interconnected future. 

Huang Yong Ping's Frolic will be on exhibition at The Curve, Barbican Art Gallery, London until September 21^st, 2008.

Admission Free

This exhibition is supported by the Institut Francais.