两年前还没听说过古根海姆的他，在那里办了一场什么展？

Two years ago, as the Hong Kong artist Wong Ping tells it, he hadn’t even heard of the Guggenheim Museum. A self-taught animator with an online following for his childlike cartoons on disturbing subjects, he had a scant exhibition record. Mr. Wong was new to the workings of the international art world when a gallery director suggested he visit the Guggenheim while he was in New York. His initial reaction was, “What an interesting name.”

按香港艺术家黄炳的说法，两年前，他甚至都还没听说过古根海姆博物馆(Guggenheim Museum)。这位自学成才的动画师用孩子气的卡通风格表现令人不安的主题，在网上吸引了众多追随者。他几乎没什么办展记录。一位画廊总监建议他在纽约时去古根海姆看看，当时他对国际艺术界的运转还一窍不通。他的第一反应是，“这名字挺有意思的”。

Now Mr. Wong, who is 34, is the youngest of five Chinese artists, including Cao Fei, Samson Young, Duan Jianyu and Lin Yilin, featured in the Guggenheim’s exhibition “One Hand Clapping,” through Oct. 21.

34岁的黄炳现在是参加古根海姆“单手拍掌”(One Hand Clapping)展览的五名中国艺术家中最年轻的一位，其他艺术家有曹斐、杨嘉辉、段建宇、林一林，展览将持续至10月21日。

“One Hand Clapping” is the last of three shows sponsored by The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative, a program that allowed the museum to commission and acquire new works. With a virtual reality piece featuring the basketball star Jeremy Lin and a sound installation using imaginary instruments, this iteration will be the most playful. Its theme, as Xiaoyu Weng, the museum’s associate curator for Chinese art, put it, is: “how we can come up with more imaginative ways of envisioning the future.”

“单手拍掌”是何鸿毅家族基金会中国艺术计划赞助的三场展览中的最后一场。该计划使博物馆得以委托并购入新的作品。展览收入了一件有篮球明星林书豪的虚拟现实作品，以及一件使用想象乐器的声音装置，将是三场展览中最为活泼的一场。正如古根海姆中国艺术助理策展人翁笑雨所说，它的主题是“我们如何用更具想象力的方式去构想未来。”

As opposed to the increasingly homogenized visions of sci-fi movies, Mr. Wong imagines his own future in an animation, “Dear, can I give you a hand?,” about a sexually frustrated elderly man and his seductive daughter-in-law. Inspired by an encounter the artist had with an 80-year-old man throwing away a stack of X-rated VHS tapes, this account of a perverted, yet ineffectual father figure, rendered in bright colors and naïve design, could be read as a metaphor for Hong Kong and its precarious, often humiliating relationship with the alluring yet authoritarian power of China. “He is the butt of the joke,” according to Ms. Weng.

作为对越来越千篇一律的科幻电影的抗议，黄炳用一部动画片《亲，需要服务吗?》幻想了自己的未来。作品讲述了一个在性方面存在困扰的老年男人和他性感撩人的儿媳妇的故事，艺术家有一次遇到一个在丢弃一堆限制级录像带的80岁男人，从而启发他创作这件作品。这个用明亮的颜色和幼稚的造型表现出来的好色却无能的父亲形象，可以被解读为一种比喻，象征着香港和诱人却又施加强权的中国之间并不稳定且常常令人蒙羞的关系。“嘲笑的对象是他自己，”翁笑雨说。

The curator said she was struck by Mr. Wong’s “sharp, pungent, intelligent sense of criticality and humor” from the first time she encountered his work at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2016. “He acutely responds to his surroundings on a micro level but also speaks to the social and political reality,” she said.

策展人表示，2016年12月第一次在迈阿密海滩巴塞尔艺术展(Art Basel Miami Beach)上看见黄炳的作品时，她当即被那“锋利、尖锐、聪颖的批判和幽默感”所打动。“他不仅敏锐地从微观层面上对他的周围环境作出了回应，还触及了社会和政治现实，”她说。

The exhibition is his second appearance in New York this year; he was featured prominently in the New Museum’s 2018 Triennial, “Songs for Sabotage.” There, in a single surreal animation starring zany anthropomorphic animals, the artist offered three fables that imbue details of everyday life in Hong Kong — music clubs, military service, and public transportation — with a profound sense of social awkwardness. Even without the sexually explicit canoodlings that are evident in much of his work, this animation still managed to make viewers feel uncomfortably intrigued.

这个展览是黄炳今年在纽约的第二次亮相。在新美术馆(New Museum)的2018年三年展“破坏之歌”(Songs for Sabotage)中，他担当了重要角色。展览中，艺术家用一部满是滑稽拟人化动物的超现实动画讲述了三则寓言，其中有大量香港日常生活的细节——音乐俱乐部、兵役、公共交通，带着深刻的社交障碍感。这里没有他的许多作品中有的露骨性场面，但依然给观众有一种不自在的刺激。

Holland Cotter of The Times cited the video as “one of the few pieces with obvious digital roots and with politics that feel as much existential as circumstantial.”

时报的霍兰德·科特(Holland Cotter)称此作是“少数几个带有明显的数码根源的作品之一，还有给人带来同等的存在感与情境感的政治”。

Gary Carrion-Murayari, co-curator of the New Museum’s Triennial, met the artist just over a year ago in Hong Kong, upon the recommendation of virtually every local curator, even though Mr. Wong had had only two gallery exhibitions. “We talked about the economic anxieties that are bound up in Hong Kong at this moment, the way they affect his generation most strongly and how they can fracture and isolate individuals,” Mr. Carrion-Murayari recalled. He was very surprised by the meeting, saying there was a “disconnect” between this shy, soft-spoken young man and the often bizarre videos he was creating.

就在之前一年，新美术馆三年展的共同策展人加里·卡里翁-姆拉亚里(Gary Carrion-Murayari)在当地几乎所有策展人的推荐下，在香港与黄炳见过面，尽管他当时只办过两场画展。“我们谈了香港目前所面临的经济焦虑，这种焦虑对他这一代人产生的最大影响是什么，以及这会如何撕裂和孤立个体，”卡里翁-姆拉亚里回忆道。那次会面让他很意外，称这个模样害羞、说话温和的年轻人，和他制作出常常有些古怪的影像之间存在“脱节”。

This double dose of museum exposure is a bit intimidating for Mr. Wong, whose first brush with the mainstream art world was only in 2015, with the inclusion of one of his animations in a group show organized by the M+ museum in Hong Kong.

这种双倍剂量的博物馆曝光，对黄炳来说有些吓人。他在主流艺术界的初次亮相是在2015年，当时他的一个动画被纳入了香港M+博物馆组织的群展中。

“I had no idea what I was expecting because I didn’t know what curating means,” Mr. Wong said in an interview in March in Hong Kong, speaking in flawless English. “I never heard of this term. What does installation mean? I don’t know.”

“我完全不知道会怎样，因为我都不知道策展是什么意思，”黄炳三月份在香港接受采访时说，他说着一口流利的英语。“我从没听过这个词。装置是什么意思?我不知道。”

Self-effacing in his delivery, he is a one-man operation, writing short stories that he turns into scripts and then animates, without assistants. He seems reluctant to don any mantle, most especially “representative of Hong Kong youth,” though he said he identified strongly with the sense of diminishing opportunities and increasing encroachments on freedom that many his age share.

这个谈吐谦和的年轻人一切都是亲力亲为。他撰写短篇故事，转变为剧本再制成动画，不用助手。他似乎不愿担上任何名头，特别是“香港青年的代表”这个头衔。尽管他说自己对他这个年纪很多人所感受到的机会减少、自由受到更多侵犯有着强烈认同。

By his own admission Mr. Wong was a lackluster student in Hong Kong when his parents — a cook and a homemaker — shipped him off to Perth, Australia, for high school and college. Even there, he preferred playing video games to attending classes. He managed to graduate with a major in multimedia design at Curtin University, in 2005, and later taught himself editing software to secure a postproduction job at a local television station on his return to Hong Kong. It was boring work requiring him to retouch images.

黄炳的父母是厨师和家庭主妇，他承认，在他们送他去澳大利亚珀斯上高中和大学前，他在香港是一个表现平平的学生。即使在珀斯，他也宁愿玩电子游戏，不去上课。2005年，他从科廷大学(Curtin University)多媒体设计专业毕业，后来自学了编辑软件。回到香港后，他在当地一家电视台找到一份后期制作的工作。这份工作的内容是修图，无聊乏味。

As an escape from the tedium he began writing short stories that he posted on his blog and later tried to animate using his limited skills in Photoshop and After Effects software. He posted his first animation on YouTube in 2010. Titled “Lin Pink Pink,” it depicted a bald middle-aged man commenting on his wife’s nipples. Soon local bands spotted his postings and asked him to make music videos, charmed by the way the low-tech look of his cartoons heightened the perversity of his adult-only psychosexual dramas.

为了摆脱这种单调，他开始写短篇小说，并且发表在自己的博客上。后来，他又尝试用有限的Photoshop技术和After Effects软件，把它们做成动画片。2010年，他在YouTube上发布了自己的第一部动画片，名叫《乳粉粉》(Lin Pink Pink)，内容是一个秃顶的中年男子评论妻子的乳头。很快，当地乐队发现了他的作品，并请他制作音乐视频。他的动画片是少儿不宜的性心理剧，但是看上去技术含量很低，因而显得更加变态，正是这一点吸引了那些乐队。

In 2011 the Hong Kong band No One Remains A Virgin, commissioned Mr. Wong to animate their song, “Under the Lion Crotch,” a reference to a poor neighborhood situated below the Lion Rock mountain in Hong Kong. He created a graphic nightmare, alternatively cute and vicious, with school kids wearing I Heart Hong Kong T-shirts jumping rope until their heads explode. With lyrics like “Our land is brutally torn apart by conglomerates, their thriving business had left us homeless,” the video was seen as a direct rebuke to a popular phrase, “Lion Rock Spirit,” embraced by politicians to boost Hong Kong’s work ethic and promote urban development.

2011年，香港乐队No One Remains A Virgin委托黄炳把他们的歌曲《狮子胯下》(Under the Lion Crotch)做成动画片。这首歌和一个地处香港狮子山下的贫穷社区有关。他设计了一个逼真的噩梦，交替着可爱与残忍。学童们穿着印有“I♡HK”字样的T恤在跳绳，直到被爆头。歌词唱道：“四周酷刑收购，劫匪丰收我却无力自救。”这段视频被认为是对“狮子山精神”这个流行口号的直接驳斥。很多政客用这个词来宣传香港的职业道德和城市开发。

Winning awards in Hong Kong, the video brought the artist his first national attention and the impetus to quit his job. Mr. Wong has been posting his animations online ever since.

这部视频在香港获奖无数，让他第一次在全国引起关注，并促使他辞去了工作。自那以后，黄炳不断把自己的动画片发到网上。

Like many young people in Hong Kong, Mr. Wong and his friends were galvanized by the 2014 protests of the Umbrella Movement. They joined thousands who took to the streets, frightened by explosions of tear gas and thrilled by the energy of the crowds.

和香港的很多年轻人一样，黄炳和朋友也受到2014年雨伞运动的鼓舞。他们和成千上万人一起走上街头。催泪瓦斯的爆炸声让他们感到害怕，人群的活力又让他们感到兴奋。

“It made us stronger, I believe, even though in the end the revolution kind of failed,” he said, adding that many of his friends have since moved abroad and he is considering joining them. “In the society, we all have doubts now and people have less emotional reactions to the politics. We are really disappointed and we are feeling powerless.”

“我认为它让我们变得更坚强了，尽管最后革命差不多算是失败了，”他说，并表示在那之后，他的很多朋友移居国外，他也正在考虑加入他们的行列。“在社会上，我们现在都有疑惑，人们对政治的反应不那么激动了。我们非常失望，感到无能为力。”

According to Michelle Yun, senior curator of modern and contemporary art at Asia Society, Mr. Wong’s work is “very sophisticated, even though it looks as if it was made by the hand of a sweaty adolescent.” She points out that his retro cartoony style of animation diffuses the somewhat disturbing subject matter, engaging viewers in scenarios from which they may at first wish to recoil.

据亚洲协会(Asia Society)现代及当代艺术资深策展人云翠兰(Michelle Yun)说，黄炳的作品“非常老练，尽管看上去像是出自一个浑身冒汗的少年之手”。她指出，他的复古卡通动画风格讲述的是一个令人有些不安的主题，让观众进入他们一开始可能想要避开的场景。

“Just as Picasso was shocking in his time, this may feel like it is transgressing the boundaries of art,” she said, “but it makes you question your own boundaries.”

“就像毕加索在他生活的时代惊世骇俗一样，这可能会让人觉得它超越了艺术的界限，”她说，“但它会让你质疑自己的界限。”