stephanie mei 玫 huang 黄

les bow
2021
clay

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

rid of poison
2023
video, sound
costume in collaboration with Tashi Fay
video: Gabriel Bruce, Max Knight

Wearing the horn itself, huang takes on the Oriental monstrosity of the heraldic beast. The unicorn––its medieval wildness and Orientalist vigor––is historically depicted as in need of taming, often by the strength of the Scotsman in Celtic lore, the touch of the mother of Christ for Renaissance artists, or the love of a virgin maiden in writing of the Middle Ages. In rid of poison, the unicorn is alone. huang’s unicorn pierces its precariously sharp horn into dyed bodies of water contained by a thin layer of plastic, with suspensions of giant kelp, loose chrysanthemum flowers, pu-erh tea leaves, bladderwrack, ground turmeric, rosebuds and the like. The relationship between the unicorn’s horn and the liquid it dips into becomes ambiguous: which is doing the purifying? Repeatedly doused by pockets of contaminated liquid, the unicorn and its environment become visibly soiled in the process of wetting the unicorn’s horn. While subduing the unicorn was the most definitive feature of its imperial representations in order to affirm masculine, national prowess, huang’s unicorn is unchained, stained, and undead.

night
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

mini-dv converted to digital, sound

four self portraits as a cowboy
2020

In collaboration with V Haddad and Sam Richardson’s Self Portrait Service.

white vegetable i
2020
16mm transferred to digital
video in collaboration with Erica Sheu

white vegetable ii
2020
16mm transferred to digital

white vegetable iii
2020
16mm transferred to digital
video in collaboration with Erica Sheu

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.”

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︎WRITING; PROGRAMMING