stephanie mei huang - how to hobble a young horse

stephanie mei huang is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist. They use a diverse range of media and strategies including film/video, installation, social interventions, sculpture, writing, and painting. They completed their MFA in Art at the California Institute of the Arts (2020), and they received their BA from Scripps College (2016).  They recently exhibited at the Hauser and Wirth Book Lab, Contemporary Calgary (Calgary), the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, 4th Ward Project Space (Chicago), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the New Wight Biennial at the University of California Los Angeles, Cerritos Gallery, and the Arizona State University Art Museum (Tempe).  They have been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The Getty Foundation, the California Community Foundation, among others. They have taught at non-profits such as the Marfa Studio of Arts and Venice Arts. They are a participant at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.

"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.”– stephanie mei huang

"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.

This body of work is an ongoing 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 series “Genghis Chan: Private Eye” (1989), in which the Chinese American narrator states: “A foul lump started making promises in my voice.” If we consider the foul lump to be a repulsive object that hijacks the Chinese American subject’s racialized body for the vocalization of others, we must consider how the lump arrives in the larynx in the first place. In Freudian melancholia, melancholy is pathological and enduring, in which the ego wishes to incorporate the object into herself through devouring.

“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.