"Hammam" – Fundación NMAC, Vejer de la Frontera, Cádiz Province, Spain

Huáng Yong Ping (born in 1954) is a French contemporary artist and one of the most famous Chinese avant-garde artists. Born in Xiamen, he was recognized as the most controversial and provocative artist of the Chinese art scene in 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 as a postmodernist, radical avant-garde group. However, their works were often perceived as modern. The group publicly burned their works in protest, and Huang stated, "Artwork to artist is like opium to men. Until art is destroyed, life is never peaceful." The group subsequently stopped exhibiting in any further public showings.

His work creates tensions and offers an alternative to the Eurocentric ideology through the use of material and metaphors which, like he himself, are foreign to the Western public. Furthermore, his many allusions illustrate his modus operandi on a large scale when it comes to overcoming the concerns of contemporary society: offering the public the possibility of a face to face encounter with the dynamics of our world by way of his site-specific facilities.

Hammam represents the artist’s vision of a traditional Andalusian public bath. For this project Huang Yong Ping worked with the idea of the continuous interaction of factors which are opposing but at the same time complimentary. In this way he transformed a military barracks into a hamman, which results in the reutilisation of the space for another type of function and plays with our idea of the reality which surrounds us, allowing us to see the possibility of renovating settings, transforming them in new universes. Constructed at three metres below ground level we enter a new world, in a place which challenges and opposes the rationalistic, cold reality of a barracks. With the work "Hammam" the artist wished to highlight the oppressed memory of Andalusia, its historic past, its legacy.

The Fundación NMAC (the Montenmedio Arte Contemporáneo) is a unique space in Spain which explores the space shared by contemporary art and nature. The objective of the NMAC Foundation is to invite international artists to carry out specific artistic projects that are in tune with the landscape. NMAC is a cultural reference in southern Europe also for its educational and cultural programming.