how to hobble a young horse

PULPO GALLERY, Murnau am Staffelsee, 16 July - 28 August 2022

“That the domain of the animal is treated as a zone of deferral means that animality subtends a great deal below the white human man at the top, who in spite of his own superior position, can be dragged down by his own queer association.” - Mel Y. Chen, “Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Afftect”

The horse has become imprecise. She is at once weaponized and abstracted as the symbol of the “free” and the “wild,” at once domesticated with a developed backbone to support human weight. She is at once simianized and anthropomorphized.


how to hobble a young horse explores the slippery terrains of animality, constraint, and consent, in both taking on the figure of the Chinese cowboy/girl and the horse in the American (U.S.) West. huang shifts animalities, in becoming them, rejecting them, and transmuting them. The body of work includes performance, film/video, sculpture, painting and photography.

The exhibition is named after huang’s most recent performance, in which huang’s cowboy avatar Stirrup Steph with her 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, a mythological space they recognize as biopolitically, historically, and thus, residually as not belonging to them. Through racial melancholia, how do we navigate new conditions from which we speak and new ways of inhabiting our subjectivities? How can we begin to consider melancholia as a realistic and productive response to the insidious underbelly of American history?


This eponymously titled exhibition self-animalizes while also re-animalizes and suggests, at the shift away from Stirrup Steph, that huang is perhaps not a cowboy, but a horse, or both. A carousel horse finds kinesis through a windshield wiper motor. Stirrup Steph’s animatronics horse, Diamond, neighs if you pat her. A roping dummy is topped with a ceramic ox/horse/dragon-head rather than a steer head. In taking on different reimagined animalized subjectivities, Stirrup Steph acknowledges, plays with, and reclaims the submissive drive of the cowboy and the American West.