Nightmare fuel

January 14, 2023 11:45 AM

99 years-old artist Huang Yongyu designed the Year of the Rabbit (from Hell) zodiac stamp for the Chinese postal service. Huang actually came on livestream to talk about his red-eyed blue rabbit, expressing that drawing a rabbit is something fun, something celebratory, and that he just hoped his rabbit would make people happy. "But it doesn't," one person replied. From What's on Weibo founder Manya Koetse.
posted by spamandkimchi (21 comments total)

Was the rabbit sent by Aku?
posted by chavenet at 12:06 PM on January 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

I would guard this rabbit with my life
posted by potrzebie at 12:07 PM on January 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

I love this rabbit. It's got awesome energy, and I hope I'm still making stuff this fun when I'm 99.
posted by phooky at 12:08 PM on January 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

I think it's the human hands that send it into the uncanny valley
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 12:53 PM on January 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

We need all the interesting rabbit depictions we can get, keep it weird!
posted by winesong at 1:09 PM on January 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

There is remarkably little about Huang Yongyu on the English-language web. From what little I’ve found online makes him seem really fascinating. I’d love to read a long in-depth article about his life and works.
posted by Kattullus at 1:13 PM on January 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

and the furry costume of it is magnificent
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 1:16 PM on January 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

I love Huang's tiger-wiener painting. Also all the owls.
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:31 PM on January 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

Wow, this is great!

I had never heard of him before but I'm really looking forward to exploring his work. The owls are great, but so are some of the other bird paintings.

I try to spend a little time looking at art every week, and now I've got a lot to look forward to for the coming week!

Thank you so much for posting this, spamandkimchi - I doubt I would have learned about Huang Yongyu otherwise!
posted by kristi at 2:15 PM on January 14, 2023

... also, I quite like his comment that "drawing a rabbit is something fun", and now I think I need to draw some rabbits this week.
posted by kristi at 2:16 PM on January 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

"Others wondered if the blue rabbit on the official Spring Festival zodiac stamp looked so wild because it just had Covid."

Despite the controversy – or actually because of it – the stamps were reportedly sold out within an hour. The stamp was called “ugly cute” (丑萌 chǒuméng) by some, meaning something can be considered somewhat charming for being so unattractive. “I first saw it and thought it was ugly, then the more I looked at it, I started to think it was ugly cute and maybe even cute,” one Chongqing-based commenter wrote.

This is kind of hilarious. I'd keep quoting, but man, does Weibo not like that :P
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:19 PM on January 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

I love it.
posted by edencosmic at 2:25 PM on January 14, 2023

I love the beast and also find it terrifying. Like CheeseDigestsAll, it's the human hands which push it into nightmare territory.
posted by doctornemo at 4:37 PM on January 14, 2023

From Manya Koetse:
"Its also been nicknamed "Omicron Rabbit" 奥密克戒兔" - yikes!
posted by doctornemo at 4:38 PM on January 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Here's an article in Chinese (I used the dreaded Google translate, so my understanding of it leaves something to be desired) that discusses the blacklisting of some of Huang's work. Apparently, he has been painting owls since childhood, and loves that in the day, they tend to sleep with an eye open. And so the owl with one eye open paintings, so charming, were seen by institutions of government and the communist party as evidence of "hat(red) for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and socialist system".
posted by kaelynski at 5:37 PM on January 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

The "fascinating" link from Katullus does, indeed, make him sound really fascinating, and contains this:

In the 1950s Huang became the youngest teacher at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, Huang was one of the leading print and ink artists in the country.

He created little in the way of art during those tumultuous ten years, but his ink and wash painting Maotouying or Owl which portrays an owl with one eye closed, was criticized as an attack on socialism, as it can be seen to portray public officials turning a blind eye to wrong doings.

It also notes:

Huang never went to a regular art school but he had talent and worked hard. He studied art and literature by himself and learnt from friends, society and life.

...

When he was young, Huang was famous for his prints, which used bold lines and an unconstrained style. Until the 1960s he devoted himself mainly to woodcuts.

posted by kristi at 6:12 PM on January 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

I may be misremembering, but did he paint an owl that was somehow seen as an attack on Mao’s wife?
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:54 PM on January 14, 2023

The Winking Owl: Visual Effect and Its Art Historical Thick Description by Eugene Y. Wang is exactly the sort of in-depth I was looking for but not finding before. It is all about Huang Yongyu’s owl painting. Here’s the beginning of part one (there are three):

Can a painting such as the one shown here (fig. 1) say anything at all? In Western academic settings questions like this either appear to be worn-out commonplaces that induce yawns or are suspected to be quibbles, equivocation and play on the different senses of the word say. In a different institutional universe, however, these same questions may carry frightening implications. In March 1974 a group of painters in China, specializing mostly in traditional ink painting, were charged by the Ministry of Culture with blaspheming "the Socialist system" -meaning the state. Their paintings were put on public display in China's National Art Gallery in Beijing, as the so-called Black Painting Exhibition. The organizers' captions constituted a de facto indictment of the artists' subversive political intent. Among the paintings showcased, the centerpiece was Huang Yongyu's Owl (fig. 1), which shows a squat owl perched on a sparsely budded tree branch, facing the viewer head on, with an enigmatic expression that can be seen either as a wink or as an one-eye-open stare. Its exhibition caption read: "Huang Yongyu produced this Owl in 1973. The owl, with its one eye open and the other closed, is a self-portrait of the likes of Huang. It reveals their attitude: an animosity toward the Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the Socialist system." A grueling chastisement followed the Ministry of Culture's categorical pronouncement. Reprimand sessions ran for months in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, where Huang was a professor of woodblock printing, to coerce the painter into confessing his antisocialist stances. The controversy escalated to such a national proportion that it even came to the attention of Chairman Mao, who, irritated by the excesses of the factionalist cultural czars and their overzealous censorship serving their partisan interest, commented wryly: “An owl habitually keeps one eye open and other closed. The artist does possess the common knowledge, doesn't he?" He dismissed the cynical use of art criticism as "metaphysics going berserk; a skewed view!" Mao's pronouncement on the matter quieted the critics and put the controversy to rest, even though he had no intention of changing the overall political tenor of the time. After Mao's death in 1976 the shrill ideological regimentation of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and its cultural policies were overhauled, and Huang and his peers were accordingly exonerated. The cultural inquisition by the bigots of the previous regime was dismissed by post-Mao revisionists as political engineering spilling over into and running berserk in the art world. The once castigated artists of the Black Paintings became heroes, and their paintings received critical and popular acclaim. Out of a field of eight candidates Huang was awarded the commission to design the composition for the ninety-foot monumental tapestry of a mist-shrouded mountain panorama that was to be hung on the wall behind Mao's statue in the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall.

Here is the same paper in pdf-form, if you prefer that.
posted by Kattullus at 3:12 AM on January 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Reminds me of Gritty's rollout! I'm always pretty charmed when something that's meant to have mass-market, anodyne appeal turns out...uh, all fucked up. I like the demon rabbit.
posted by grandiloquiet at 8:47 AM on January 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Just want to add that Huang is a really good writer too, and a second cousin to the famous writer Shen Congwen/沈从文. I read the first one of his multi-volume memoir, about his childhood in the western region of Hunan province around 1920s-1930s. He's a (Chinese) national treasure.
posted by of strange foe at 1:34 PM on January 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Am I the only one who read this and was expecting to see Binky or Bongo?
posted by Chuffy at 1:49 PM on January 17, 2023