Trousers with Firecrackers
Fireworks have been made in China for more than a thousand years. In 1987, Huang lined a pair of pants with a hundred small firecrackers, donned the garment, and then ignited the explosives with a cigarette. The charred trousers are now displayed inside out in a cardboard box alongside a photograph of the original performance. Huang was a founder of the Chinese art group Xiamen Dada, which blended Chinese Buddhist philosophy with the irreverent performances and disruptive strategies of the European art movement known as Dada. After participating in a 1986 exhibition, Xiamen Dada’s members burned their artworks as an act of liberation. As the group wrote: “Until art is destroyed, life is never peaceful.”
Credit: Committee on Painting and Sculpture Funds, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund (by exchange)
Xiamen 1987 (boxed in Paris 1999)
Trousers, firecrackers, black-and-white photograph and tape in cardboard box, in two parts
80.0 x 104.1 x 5.1 cm
732.2018.a-b
Image and text © MoMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019
Where you'll find this
Permanent collection
