Circus

The Circus presents a carefully planned scene full of dramatic tensions: two giant wooden hands, one hanging from the ceiling, the other broken, scattered on the floor. Fifteen headless animals standing in uncanny calm around the bamboo cage, ranging from a bear, lion, and bull to a goat and rabbit, with even a bat suspended in mid-flight. The holes gaping from the animals’ necks are neatly draped with red-colored fabric, as if the blood had congealed the moment their heads were cut off. The hanging hand is connected by strings to the skeleton of a monkey, which is operating as a puppeteer the skeleton of an even smaller monkey.

The robbed and hatted monkey skeleton and the massive hand above it seem to refer to the story of the Monkey King and Buddha from the classic Chinese novel “Journey to the West”. However, the giant hand has the same movable joints as a marionette, indicating that it is also controlled by some invisible power.

Animals, either stuffed or living, have repeatedly taken on the metaphorical role of human behavior in Huang Yong Ping’s works since the 1990s. The headless animals in Circus clearly have the same role as the insects and reptiles in World Theater of 1993. Here human beings are simultaneously the subject and the audience. “The Circus is not only an extension of P.T.BARUM‘s circus, but is a circus of headless animals, or headless animals visiting a marionette theater, or headless animals taking place of human beings, or headless animals as embodiment of human beings.”（Huang Yong Ping)

In the symbolic structure of the Circus, the headless animals, monkey skeletons, and giant hands are not in a one-way chain of controlling and being controlled. Faith itself is indeed the product of human ideology.