Stephanie Mei Huang

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

Within the first six years of my life, I moved from Wisconsin to Indiana, then to Yokohama, Japan, and to Shanghai, China. Through this diasporic upbringing, my work finds its roots in globalization and the role of cultural fragmentation and displacement in changing perceptions of nationhood, loss, and identity. Through research and practice, I aim to erode the violent mythologies that perpetuate expansionist, exceptionalist, and settler colonial narratives, in the hopes of excavating forgotten, erased, and partial histories. I yearn to locate sites of emergence from which we can perhaps fabulate new and adjacent histories. As a Chinese American artist, I dialogue with and challenge the affective racialized, gendered constructions that codify my body and identity as “harmless” and “non-threatening” within the hegemonic West. I am interested in how my presence has the capacity to disarrange systems of prediction based upon otherness and threat. I see slippery, chameleonic identity as a form of infiltration: a soft power reversal within hard architectures of power. I explore these subjects through a diverse range of media and strategies including film/video, installation, social interventions, sculpture, writing, and painting. My most recent ongoing body of work, the foul lump in my throat, is a study in racial melancholia and racial grief, in examining how and why we fixate, even devour that which we are excluded from. The foul lump is a reference to John Yau’s poetic...

Artwork