On December 1, 1987, Huang Yong Ping placed a classical Chinese art history book and a Western art history book into a washing machine and washed them for two minutes. These two long-standing histories were transformed into a pile of unreadable pulp within two minutes. One of the most important Chinese artists on the post-1990s international contemporary art scene, Huang was born in Xiamen, China, in…

Huang Yong Ping’s art is an entire ontology in itself. It’s a universe unto itself, and like the universe itself, it’s a complex system generated out of paradox and perplexity, which endow it with ultimate dynamism and vitality. His art is powerful but intelligent, revealing the essence of existence: that the truth of the world is that there is no unique ontological truth. The world is an eternal…

An amazingly complex American artist, Paul Thek (1933–1988) began his career in New York in the 1960s with a series of works collectively titled Technological Reliquaries, created as a reaction against the war in Vietnam. They combined pristinely assembled, minimalist containers with brutal, wax-modeled chunks of meat or severed limbs (one of them, Hippopotamus, is in the Walker’s collection). Now, some 30…

For nearly four decades, Chuck Close has painted dozens of large-scale faces of family members, friends, and fellow artists, including Philip Glass, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, and Kiki Smith. But, more than any other subject, he’s painted himself. The first such self-portrait, begun in 1967 and purchased in 1969 by the Walker Art Center, was followed by nearly 100 more, each exploring different media…

Everyone loves it and feels some ownership as they point out the center-piece spoon and cherry to their visitors; and now that it’s just across the way from what is rapidly becoming another Twin Cities landmark—the Walker’s gleaming new expansion—it’s even easier to find. As people drive by or stroll the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden grounds, however, they discover that they can’t say exactly how…