Media Kit - stephanie mei huang

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"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

 

PULPO GALLERY is pleased to announce stephanie mei huang’s upcoming solo exhibition how to hobble a young horse, on view from July 16 through August 28, 2022. An opening reception with an artist talk will be held on Saturday, 16 July 2022 from 5 pm to 8 pm and we are especially happy to welcome stephanie mei huang (pronouns: they/them/their) in Murnau. On this occasion an artist talk will be held at 6:30 pm. stephanie mei huang will be joined by Clara Tang, writer and art historian and gallerist Nico Zeifang.

 

As part of the opening reception, we will celebrate the release of PULPO GALLERY's newest publication "how to hobble a young horse". The artist will be pleased to answer your questions and sign the new limited-edition publication. Visitors are kindly asked to RSVP to visit@pulpogallery.com. Please note the current hygiene rules.

 

The exhibition stephanie mei huang - how to hobble a young horse features the most recent works by the interdisciplinary artist. After numerous exhibitions across the US, huang’s works are being shown in a solo exhibition in Germany for the first time. “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. 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? This eponymously titled exhibition self-animalizes while also re animalizes and suggests, at the shift away from Stirrup Steph, that huang is perhaps not a cowboy, but a horse, or both. A carousel horse finds kinesis through a windshield wiper motor.

Stirrup Steph’s animatronics horse, Diamond, neighs if you pat her. A roping dummy is topped with a ceramic ox/horse/dragon-head rather than a steer head. In taking on different reimagined animalized subjectivities, Stirrup Steph acknowledges, plays with, and reclaims the submissive drive of the cowboy and the American West. 
The exhibition at PULPO GALLERY is the last planned show of Stirrup Steph and heralds a new thematic phase for huang.

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. 
Exhibition text by stephanie mei huang and A. C. Smith

 

More information can be found on our website.

 

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PRESS CONTACT:

Katherina Zeifang

katherina@pulpogallery.com

+49 171 1778796