Audrey Wu

At 3 p.m. on November 9, 2003, thick plumes of smoke suddenly rose from the roof of the Love River Hotel in bustling Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Residents stopped on the streets to watch, astonished. After the initial shock, they soon learned through the media that the smoke was neither a fire nor a terrorist attack, but a modern art "performance" by local artist Vincent J.F. Huang. The event, called Balefire Project (Performance), used the ancient Chinese tradition of sending out smoke signals to warn soldiers of enemy attack. Using this traditional emergency communication form, Huang intended to simulate the 9.11 terrorist attack and to send a warning message to the public of the conflicts and negativity in modern society. Not surprisingly, Huang had to overcome opposition from government officials who found the project dangerous and "not art" before launching the performance. In the end, he won the right to perform the piece. Despite sparking heated debates about what is and is not appropriate as a public arts performance, Huang says the event succeeded in attracting media attention and triggering public reaction.

Balefire Project was Huang's most high profile - and controversial - art performance to date, but it is far from his only news-making event. Over the past eight years, Huang has organized dozens of exhibitions and arts events in Taiwan, the UK, and now mainland China - all designed to shock and inspire viewers, and to change their social views.

"Unorthodox" is a good word to describe Huang. Much about his character is clear from his name-card, which reads: curator, arts master, and participant of CEIBS EMBA2007. As the card states, he is not only an artist, he is also part social activist and part businessman.

Artist's Responsibility

A visit to one of Huang's exhibitions makes clear that his artistic projects focus on cultural conflicts, communication, and the negative impact of technology on society. He seeks to attract public attention to these problems through art, by encouraging audiences to ask: Do technological advancements make us happier? Do modern communication tools bring us closer to one another? Why have human relations become colder and more distant as civilizations have modernized?

At a recent exhibition, one representative painting juxtaposes a homing pigeon against the snarl of city traffic networks. In another interactive display, a smiling life-sized robot first shakes hands with exhibition-goers, amusing and charming them, then suddenly kicks at them.

At Huang's "Melting Penguins" exhibition held last May in Shanghai's Creek Art Center, the show carried a strong message against global warming. The show's giant paintings depict helpless penguins set against a melting backdrop, standing atop shrinking glaciers, trudging across a sunburnt desert, or floating in a polluted city sky. In the most poignant piece, a penguin addresses an astronaut - symbolizing the highest level of human technological achievement - seeming to ask how the natural world could have transformed this way?

Huang believes artists have a duty to address social issues. "As artists, as intellectuals, we must use our works to relate our observations and criticisms of society, not just retreat to our small inner world," he says. Huang says most artists in China work within the confines of the intellectual "ivory tower." In his view, art should accomplish more than attracting the public into galleries; art should hit the streets and change people's thinking.

Art-and-Business

Huang's second profession is curator of the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art and of Taiwan's Art Space in the Academia Sinica. He views this role, which is relatively new to China, as similar to that of a film director. As curator, he oversees the planning of exhibitions, the development of a central theme or message, the selection of artists, the marketing, media, and PR, and the corporate sponsorship and donations. Throughout his work, Huang seeks to heighten the impact of the exhibition and to succeed in attracting public attention to social issues.

A key goal for Huang is to support art with sponsorship from the corporate world, in order to more effectively broadcast his message beyond the scope of an art museum. He recently received sponsorship from ShuTe University in Kaohsiung for several arts projects, and is now seeking similar partnerships in mainland China. Through such cooperative ventures, Huang seeks to fuse artistic expression into the lives of ordinary people, and to unite communities in their commitment to social issues, as well as to help boost the image of sponsoring companies.

Huang is a man of many "firsts." His Balefire Project was the first art performance in Taiwan staged in a publicly owned space. He is the first Taiwanese artist to participate in the Artists Residency Project in mainland China, a project that sponsors international artists to spend two months in China to develop new arts projects. He is also most likely mainland China's first and only EMBA degree-holding artist.

What made Huang want to study an EMBA? Huang finds this question easy to answer: He says the business degree was a natural next step given his goal of bringing art out of the ivory tower and down to the street level. "Using art to boost and promote CSR is the major reason I took an EMBA," he says. "CEIBS students are all high calibre and the school puts great emphasis on artistic accomplishment. This will help me build what I call art-and-business cooperation."

The rapid economic development and globalization of China over the past three decades has resulted in new pressure on Chinese companies to differentiate their brands. Huang hopes to tap into this new drive among domestic firms by offering them innovative and fashionable ways to distinguish themselves from the competition via art. As he explains, sponsoring arts events can be an effective way to publicly express corporate values and to build a brand image.

While it is fairly common in the West for companies to sponsor arts activities, Huang hopes to bring the same tradition to China. He points to Unilever's continued sponsorship of large-scale exhibitions in London's Tate Gallery of Modern Art in recent years, a program that has effectively raised the company's image. Huang also commends LVMH for its support of art, including its current sponsorship of an exhibition featuring sculptor Richard Serra (running this June to September at New York's Museum of Modern Art). Meanwhile, several Taiwan-based banks and companies have invited artists to create artistic spaces in their lobbies to transform cold, serious places into places of warmth, beauty, and social consciousness. This is the type of art-and-business cooperation that Huang is committed to spreading into China. No doubt many artists, and many socially-responsible businesspeople, are hoping he succeeds.