LE SERPENT D'OCÉAN

North of Saint-Brevin on the Nez de Chien beach, at "the transverse limit of the sea" (the boundary between river and sea), Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping's immense Serpent d'Océan (Ocean Snake) emerges, its skeleton appearing to have come from an archaeological dig. Its movement brings it to life: we can guess that it has crossed the seas to come ashore on this beach. The line of its vertebrae plays with the curve of the Saint-Nazaire bridge, and the way it rests recalls the architecture of carrelets, the typical fisheries of the Atlantic coast. Positioned on the foreshore, the skeleton appears at the rhythm of the tide, and will gradually become home to marine flora and fauna. Artist Huang Yong Ping, creator of our Ocean Snake and honorary citizen of our town, passed away on October 21, 2019. As the Kamel Mennour gallery, which represented him, points out, "Huang Yong Ping?s work, always profound and forceful, like his joyful, brilliant and wise person, was committed to enlivening the role of art, not as dead matter and aesthetic objects, but as an essence of overflowing life". Portrait of a free-spirited, avant-garde artist who became an honorary citizen of the town of Saint-Brevin in 2014. French for 20 years Born in Xiamen, Fujian province, China, on February 18, 1954, the artist died accidentally in his Ivry-sur-Seine studio on October 19, aged just 65. Known and recognized for his outsized, committed works, he had lived in France for 30 years and was naturalized in 1999. A major figure in Chinese avant-garde art in the 1980s, inspired by the multi-disciplinary Dada movement, which challenged ideological, aesthetic and political conventions and constraints, he created the Xiamen Dada group, a reference to cultural revolt. His works are free reinterpretations of Western philosophies and myths, revealing their unspoken and dark sides. censored works In the early 1980s, Xiamen Dada's first exhibition in Fujian was censored by the authorities, and the collective responded by burning their canvases, replacing them with garbage and objects collected from the surrounding area. When the dramatic events of Tiananmen Square broke out in 1989, Huang Yong Ping was in France for the "Les Magiciens de la Terre" exhibition. He decided to stay and live there. Numerous exhibitions He took part in numerous exhibitions, notably at the Musée national des arts d?Afrique et d?Océanie and the Venice Biennale. Each of his works is inspired by the historical, political, societal and architectural context of its exhibition venue. In 2012, as part of the Voyage à Nantes contemporary art biennial, Estuaire, Huang Yong Ping created and imagined the Ocean Serpent (an emblematic figure from Chinese mythology). Located on the foreshore at the tip of Nez-de-Chien, the 130-meter-long skeleton of the snake with 135 vertebrae appears to the rhythm of the tides. Today, it is the delight of passers-by and tourists alike, who like to take photos of it and invent their own stories. Huang Yong Ping created a new, even larger snake in the nave of the Grand Palais for the "Monumenta" exhibition in 2016. If you'd like to find out more about the snake and its environment, come and decipher it with Amandine, our heritage coordinator, on a guided tour. Find out more here >>>>>>