The 54-year-old was recently in town to give a talk at the AAA before heading to Beijing, where the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Dashanzi, the capital's art district, is showing a retrospective of his work which runs until June 22.

As the scale of the exhibition curated by Walker Art Centre in the US suggests, Huang is considered one of the most significant contemporary artists, Chinese or otherwise, for his highly cerebral and heavily referenced works.

Titled The House of Oracles, the show started in Minneapolis and moved to Massachusetts and Vancouver before going to Beijing. Featuring works from the late 1980s to the present, the retrospective has a lot of ground to cover, from arcanely philosophical installations and politically charged art to, well, oracles. 'Making art and casting oracles is not quite the same. But the two are very close to one another,' says Huang. 'It's essential for both that you get your self, your ego, out of the way.'

The centrepiece of the exhibition is the eponymous House of Oracles, a large military-style tent that Huang also refers to as his studio. The tent is filled with divination instruments, working materials, and photos of Huang reading the I Ching. What seems like a straightforward nod to Chinese tradition, though, is equally a reference to American composer and conceptual artist John Cage.

Huang feels close to Cage's works, who in turn was an eager student of the I Ching and whose style is sometimes dubbed Taoist avant garde. Huang's free use of Taoist and Zen elements alongside avant-garde ideas puts both in a new perspective - one that transcends the usual points of reference.

If art is close to divination, and oracles in turn depend on chance and coincidence, then the accident is also of particular interest in art. For French philosopher Paul Virilio, the accident is itself a kind of oracle, revealing hitherto hidden qualities of whatever it is that meets an accident. The development of air travel is then equally the development of the plane crash. And it was such a crash that Huang seized upon in his most debated work - the Bat Project.

The bat is a partial replica of the American spy plane that landed on Hainan Island after it collided with a Chinese military jet in 2001. (The aircraft was carefully scrutinised by the Chinese military before it was disassembled and flown back to the US in another aircraft.)

Huang built the replica of the spy plane for the Guangzhou triennial in 2002. Before he could complete the work, the authorities interfered and had the replica disassembled. This unforeseen doubling of the initial accident - another accident - served as a powerful comment on the state of free expression on the mainland.

Two further exhibitions of other replicas modelled after the same spy plane - one in Shenzhen, one in Beijing - were also aborted by the government. The retrospective in the Ullens Centre is the fourth attempt. This time, the replica houses a documentation of how the project has fared so far.

'Let's see whether we'll get through with it this time,' Huang says, laughing.

It is important for art, the artist says, to have a political dimension. 'Especially since art has become business increasingly, a kind of decoration or status symbol. That takes away its life force. It becomes mere ornament.'

Skyrocketing prices for contemporary art from China on the international market are not doing any good in his view.

'If you want to make money, China is a pretty good place. If it's not money that you're after, you're going to get into trouble. After all if money is not your aim, you're certain to have ulterior motives.'

Born in Xiamen, Huang studied fine art in Hangzhou. He made his first public appearances in 1986 as founder of the Xiamen Dada Movement. With his fellow South Chinese Dadaists, he created a series of events that confused everybody, friend and foe: during a 1986 show in the Fujian Art Museum Huang and his cohorts displayed scaffolding from a nearby construction site - instead of the artwork they had used to rent the museum space.

A month earlier, following an exhibition in Xiamen, he burned his works in front of the museum gates.

In 1989 he went to France to take part in a group exhibition in the Pompidou Centre in Paris. But during his four weeks abroad, the democracy movement ended in the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Huang decided to stay in France. 'Another accident,' he says.

It was in the years after the Tiananmen incident that new, independent-minded artist movements emerged all over the country. Collectively known as the New Wave in the 1980s, artists struggled to break free from the ubiquitous socialist realism.

For decades, arts on the mainland had to serve political orthodoxy and its rhetoric of progress. Not wanting to take orders any more, young artists made self-realisation the new big thing.

Not the Xiamen Dadaists, though, who took critical issue with the New Wave art and its theme of self-expression. 'The desire for individuality and attracting attention has turned into the most serious disease of avant-garde artists,' Huang said in 1989.

Serious not least because it seduces artists to narrow their perspective and repeat themselves. 'If you have an idea, you are expected to carry it through consistently. You will do it once,

10 times, 100 times. You will do it for a year, then for 10 years; you are expected to insist on doing it obstinately,' he says.

Huang is certainly not repeating himself. Constantly bringing new angles into play, his work comprises a large array of themes, styles and media. But the quick shifts are not for the sake of novelty. Speaking like a Zen master, he says: 'Pursuing innovation is meaningless. Pursuing non-innovation is also meaningless. In fact, 'pursuing' is the source of meaninglessness.'

A constant, though, is Huang's interest in dissolving petrified perspectives, sometimes literally. In The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes, Huang did just what the title suggests and produced a lump of grey paper pulp. As an artist who favours free-floating possibilities over definite meanings, he leaves it open whether this is a sarcastic comment on the levelling of cultural differences, or the liberating transformation of rigid, ultimately oppressive stories into the primeval mass that they emerged from in the first place.

Huang is careful not to get trapped in phoney alternatives, and this extends to questions of cultural and national allegiance as well. After living in France for nearly 20 years, he finds it pointless to wonder where he feels more at home, in China or in Europe.

'An artist should shake off notions of country and state. It's not important. I can't even say whether I'm a Chinese or a French artist.'

The House of Oracles, until June 1. Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, 798 Art District, 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing.

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