(self-portraits as) neither donkey nor horse
6x9 inches
135 pages
111 limited editions
hand-editioned
A shift/rupture from para-narrative to personal narrative and auto-theory occurs in the publication for (self-portraits as) neither donkey nor horse. The publication features a curator’s note by Smith, an artist’s essay by huang, and three letters to the artist by Lucas Baisch, Michael Ned Holte, and Ling Tiong. The letter form reflects on a larger practice within queer communities of care centered around letter writing. Each letter touches on an intimate aspect of their relationship with huang as it relates to their current body of work.
Lucas Baisch: a playwright and artist from San Francisco, whose work circulates within themes of systems, waste, and excess. Ling Tiong: a writer and theorist based in Singapore. She received her MA in Aesthetics & Politics from the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where she wrote her thesis on the figure of the cloud in classical Chinese landscape painting. And Michael Ned Holte: a writer and independent curator based in Los Angeles, and a member of the faculty in the Program in Art at CalArts.
For the publication release event, huang collaborates with artist Julie Tolentino, and sound artist Amma Ateria. huang reads from their personal artist's essay, a self-theory, followed by a collaborative work engaging with Tolentino’s multi-decade study and practice with Chinese herbs and Eastern bodywork through a moxibustion— the burning of moxa, a mugwort, an artemisia (which huang spent this past spring foraging), on meridian points on huang’s body in a fortification of the yellow femme's somatics— accompanied by live electroacoustic / binaural beats / equal-loudness contour sound works by Ateria.
