Huang Yong Ping

Tower Snake Photograph: Courtesy Gladstone Gallery

Should some intrepid curator ever decide to organize an exhibition of “disclaimer art”—interactive work that threatens life and limb—Huang Yong Ping’s installation Tower Snake (2009) would be a shoe-in. A spiraling walkway cobbled together from metal scaffolding and bamboo that cracks loudly and alarmingly underfoot as one ascends to its precarious apex, the 37-foot-tall templelike construction would have an edge of danger even if it wasn’t modeled after a coiled snake. The source isn’t abstracted too far, either: The ramp is covered by a series of arches, each one an oversize aluminum cast of a serpent’s vertebra, while the whole piece is crowned at the top with a gaping skull. Tower Snake fills this sizable gallery, and its impact is undeniable even to those who prefer to remain on terra firma.

Most immediately recalling Vladimir Tatlin’s iconic Monument to the Third International, Huang’s rickety edifice combines Eastern and Western cultural and material traditions in ambitious fashion. Employing a substance identified with his homeland to ape the architectural structure of a European Gothic cathedral, the Chinese artist revels in the juxtaposition of geographically disparate elements. And his supersized reinterpretation of a biblical motif is similarly unavoidable.

But while Huang has assembled a potent list of ingredients, he fails to come up with a truly palatable recipe. Though great physical effort has been expended in forcing them together, the all-too-familiar elements of Tower Snake remain not only clichés, but separate clichés. The critical subversion that one might hope for never occurs, leaving a structure that’s not only unstable, but—spectacle notwithstanding—underdeveloped.—Michael Wilson

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