the unicorn is no 不 longer dead 死
hymn for chiron
2023
oil on linen, chains, ribbons
47” x 47”
47” x 47”
how to hobble a young horse
2022
huang’s cowboy avatar Stirrup Steph with their animatronic horse, Diamond, re-enacts and distorts a found video tutorial of a cowboy demonstrating in disconcertingly domineering and gendered language “how to hobble a young horse.” Stirrup Steph inscribes themselves into the script in the way that they inscribe themselves into the frontier of the American West. 2022
mini-dv converted to digital, sound
green requiem for my self iii
2022
oil on linen, sisal, stirrups, horseshoes
60 x 50”
green requiem for my self iii
2022
oil on linen, sisal, stirrups, horseshoes
60 x 50”
2022
oil on linen, sisal, stirrups, horseshoes
60 x 50”
rope elegy
2022
calf hobble, oil, silk
5 7/8 x 11 3/8”
rope elegy
2022
calf hobble, oil, silk
5 7/8 x 11 3/8”
2022
calf hobble, oil, silk
5 7/8 x 11 3/8”
how to paint a rocking horse
2020
VHS-C converted to digital, sound, carousel horse, windshield wiper motor, steel rod, bondo, adjustable 12v DC power supply, epoxy, wood, oil paint
how to paint a rocking horse, filmed on March 30, 2020 is an immediate response to these violently resurfaced histories and shifting degrees of visibility: a performative lecture during the stay-at-home order in Los Angeles, in which huang performs auto-theory from their kitchen while painting a mechanized rocking horse.
inauguration
2020
VHS-C converted to digital, sound, video, found footage
ft. MC Shaughnessy, video in collaboration with Andrew Siedenburg
huang’s avatar presents herself in inauguration, a parafiction, to actualize the psychological melancholic desire to transcend the boundaries of her imposed racialized and gendered identity as well as a political tool and catalytic agent for mapping the material consequences of her presence in territories and narratives she is excluded from.
First founded in 1965, the Cowboy Artists of America (CAA) is a contemporary society of artists dedicated to upholding frontier mythology. Their mission statement stresses commemorating “the memory and culture of the Old West as typified by the late Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, and others and through realism and the narrative/figurative tradition, depicting ìauthentic representations of the life of the West.” These “authentic representations” predominantly come from the U.S. tradition of 19th Century images of manifest destiny, imbued with imperialist, self-justifying, and aggrandizing subtexts. Aside from the first and only indigenous member to be inducted in 1993, the CAA have always been composed of white men, and refer to themselves as a “brotherhood.”
requiem for my damsel
2020
oil on linen, sisal, horseshoes
58 x 40”
requiem for my damsel
2020
oil on linen, sisal, horseshoes
58 x 40”
2020
oil on linen, sisal, horseshoes
58 x 40”
Can “cowboy drag,” a form of racialized, gendered, affective drag, not unlike code-switching, an embodied passibility, provide a mimetic form of deception and self-preservation? What are the alluring possibilities that result from racial melancholia: self-contradicting negotiations with pleasure and pain, multiplicitous selves, identity and dis-identity formation?
disappearing
stephanie mei 玫 huang 黄
night
2023
oil on wood
16 x 16”
green requiem for comus
2022
oil on linen, nickel chains
74 x 52”
night
2023
oil on wood
16 x 16”
green requiem for comus
2022
oil on linen, nickel chains
74 x 52”
2023
oil on wood
16 x 16”
green requiem for comus
2022
oil on linen, nickel chains
74 x 52”
how to hobble a young horse
2022
2022
mini-dv converted to digital, sound
four self portraits as a cowboy
2020
2020
In collaboration with V Haddad and Sam Richardson’s Self Portrait Service.
white vegetable ii
2020
16mm transferred to digital
In Melancholy and Race, Anne Anlin Cheng remarks: “since the melancholic subject experiences resentment and denigration for the lost object with which he or she is identifying, the melancholic ends up administering to his or her own self-denigration.” She continues to elaborate that ìthe melancholic is not melancholic because he or she has lost something but because he or she has introjected that which he or she now reviles,” resulting in the melancholic “ choking on...the hateful and loved thing he or she just devoured.”
a forgotten poem, recently unearthed: Shanghai cicada
I wear ear plugs to sleep for the first time tonight,
the hidden floorboards of this new house
creak like no other home
I have lived in,
and no other city I have turned my cheek upon.
What I want to hear is the cicada’s cryptic murmur—
the sort of entropy that leads to stillness—what I want,
is to be overwhelmed by vibrations of night air
soft as the caress of soy-milk on wizened skin.
I have only known what it’s like to close my eyes
before the creaking stops, just as I have only
known the angiography of former homes,
the constant junk congregating in the suitcase in my car.
When I think about Shanghai, I think about:
Saturday ballet practice in the Sunland basement gym,
how the summers are
viscous, in the way that pus
from a wound is.
I think about the highways.
The mornings here in California are ear plugs strewn
across my quilt like orange soldiers laid down to rest,
and tea stains inside my mug, measuring the days
like the sea level.
Shanghai cicada
2015
text