PARIS — The Chinese-French conceptual artist Huang Yong Ping is known for fusing complex multicultural allusions into forms that are easy to recognize but hard to interpret. His latest creation, “Empires,” commissioned for the Paris Monumenta art show, which begins on Sunday and runs through June 18, will take on the realms of military history and economic globalization.
If bigger is better, this should qualify as top-notch art. “Empires” will fill the main hall of the Grand Palais exhibition space with 305 shipping containers piled in eight “islands”; a mobile gantry crane partly supporting an aluminum snake skeleton that is more than 250 meters, or 820 feet, long and coiled over the boxes; and a representation of Napoleon’s bicorn hat 50 times the size of the original. If Rabelais’s infant giant Pantagruel had played with Lego bricks, his nursery might have looked like this.
Putting it all together was “a labor of Hercules,” said Kamel Mennour, who represents Mr. Huang in Paris and looked after the logistics of the show. Forging the 130-ton snake alone involved five specialized metal foundries, one of them in China, Mr. Mennour said, and installing the artwork required a team of hundreds, working in shifts for more than 20 hours a day for 12 days. “It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever done,” he said.
“When you are inside the Grand Palais, you will not have a global view of the installation,” Axelle Blanc, the Monumenta project coordinator, said in a joint interview with Mr. Huang, Mr. Mennour and Jean de Loisy, the curator of “Empire” and president of the Palais de Tokyo contemporary art museum, before the opening. “You will just see parts of it,” she said. “It is an artwork that initially resists global comprehension.”
Napoleon’s hat is a blown-up version of one he wore at the Battle of Eylau in East Prussia. The containers, bearing the logos of international shipping companies, are avatars of the boxes that transport 90 percent of world trade. The snake, a recurrent element in Mr. Huang’s art, is an enigmatic symbol in both Chinese and Western mythology, endowed with multiple, contradictory qualities. Visually, the vertebrae of the snake mirror the delicate Art Nouveau iron ribs of the domed roof of the Grand Palais; and the rectangular arch of the gantry crane riffs on the series of arches in and near Paris, including the Grande Arche de la Défense, which was built in 1989 for the bicentennial of the French Revolution.
That was the year Mr. Huang, invited to participate in a group show at the Pompidou Center, left China for France. Finding himself abroad during the protests in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing, he chose to stay in the West, in exile.
Mr. Huang, who was born in 1954 in Xiamen, had built a reputation in China as an avant-garde provocateur. In 1986, he founded Xiamen Dada, a postmodern group mixing Zen Buddhism with Dadaist surrealism, influenced by artists including Joseph Beuys, John Cage and Marcel Duchamp.
Mr. Huang described his artistic practice in that period as anti-art, anti-history and anti-self-expression, a time when he created works formulated by the spin of a roulette wheel or the throw of divining sticks. In one piece, he conflated Chinese and Western art history by taking a book about each, and pulping them together in a washing machine.
“He is an artist like no other,” Mr. de Loisy added. “He is an artist-philosopher, at the same time a very classical artist and a very contemporary one, both very Chinese and very European.”
“Hegel, Kant — he reads a lot of philosophy; and in his work he loves to recount stories,” Mr. de Loisy said. “He is a great fabulist, and his tales are totally open to interpretation.”
A lot of reading went into telling the tale that is the Monumenta show, Mr. Huang said.
In “history, empires were military and colonial; today, it’s more and more about economics, trade and markets,” he said. “You have the rise of multinationals that are sometimes larger than countries. They fight against each other to be the greatest empires. It’s about delocalization, the globalization of all those powers. It’s a food chain: They eat each other.” The installation “is a commentary about that,” he added. Shipping containers are the instruments of a globalized economy and “the real measure of the world chain of values.”