Huáng Yǒng Pīng was a Chinese-French contemporary artist and one of the most well known Chinese Avant-garde artists of his time. Born in Xiamen, he was recognized as the most controversial and provocative artist of the Chinese art scene of the 1980s.
Huang was one of the earliest contemporary Chinese artists to consider art as strategy. As a self-taught student, some of his earliest artistic inspirations came from Joseph Beuys, John Cage, and Marcel Duchamp. He later graduated from art school in Hangzhou in 1982, and formed Xiamen Dada in 1986. Huang's oeuvre can be characterized by four periods: anti-artistic affectation, anti-self-expression, anti-art, and anti-history. At the age of 35 in 1989, Huang traveled to Paris to partake in the seminal exhibition Magiciens de la terre. He later immigrated to France and lived there ever since. As many of his pieces are very large, they are not suitable for auction.
In 1999, Huang represented France in the Venice Biennale. In 2016, his piece "Empires" was selected for the Monumenta biennial exposition at the Grand Palais in Paris.