LE SERPENT D'OCÉAN

To the north of Saint-Brevin, on the Nez de Chien beach, at "the transverse limit of the sea" (the boundary between river and sea), rises the immense Ocean Serpent by Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping, whose skeleton appears to have come from an archaeological dig.
Its movement brings it to life: you can guess that it has crossed the seas to come ashore with its huge mouth on this beach.
The line of its vertebrae plays with the curve of the bridge at Saint-Nazaire, and the way it rests is reminiscent of the architecture of the carrelets, the fishing huts typical of the Atlantic coast. Positioned on the foreshore, the skeleton appears with the rhythm of the tide, and will gradually become home to marine flora and fauna.


The artist Huang Yong Ping, creator of our Serpent d'Océan and an honorary citizen of our city, passed away on 21 October 2019.
As stated by the Kamel Mennour gallery, which represented him, "Huang Yong Ping's work, always profound and striking, like his joyful, brilliant and wise person, sought to revitalise the role of art, not as dead matter and aesthetic objects, but as an overflowing essence of life".

Portrait of a free and 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 18 February 1954, the artist died accidentally in his studio in Ivry-sur-Seine on 19 October, aged just 65.
Known and acclaimed for his outsized and committed works, he had lived in France for 30 years and was naturalised 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 the 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 rubbish and objects collected in the surrounding area.
When the dramatic events of Tiananmen Square broke out in 1989, Huang Yong Ping was in France for the "Magicians of the Earth" 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 the place where it is exhibited.

In 2012, as part of the Voyage à Nantes contemporary art biennial, Estuaire, Huang Yong Ping created and designed the Ocean Serpent (an emblematic figure from Chinese mythology).
Located on the foreshore at the tip of Nez-de-Chien, the 130-metre-long skeleton of the snake with 135 vertebrae appears to the rhythm of the tides.
Today, it is the delight of many passers-by and tourists, who like to take photos of it and invent stories for themselves.
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 along on a guided tour with Amandine, our heritage coordinator.
Find out more here >>>>>>