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. - stephanie mei huang, 2022
The exhibition features the most recent works by the interdisciplinary artist. After numerous exhibitions across the US, huang’s work sare being shown in a solo exhibition in Germany for the first time.
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?
