Spotlight Artist

stephanie mei huang

MFA Annual
Artist profile photo

night 2023

Person in chainmail armor with a serene expression, landscape in the background.

oil on wood

hymn for chiron 2023

Centaurette with sword in fantasy landscape, fairies flying, volcano erupting in background

oil on linen with nickel chains

requiem for comus 2022

Two women with long dark hair, one nude and one draped in sheer fabric, in a lush green setting.

oil on linen, nickel chain

Featured in New American Paintings1 / 3

Artist Statement


stephanie mei (玫) huang (黄丹妮) is an interdisciplinary artist. They use a diverse range of media and strategies, including film and video, installation, social interventions, sculpture, writing, and painting. They see slippery, chameleonic identity as a form of mimetic infiltration: a soft power reversal within hard architectures of power. Born and raised by a family of mechanical engineers, huang is an auto-industry baby; they are particularly dedicated to analog forms of mechanics, refusing haptic loss, vision, and supervision, and to stress the intimacy, imperfection, tactility, and functionality of objects, vehicles, and machination.

huang’s work finds its roots in globalization, absence, and the role of displacement in changing perceptions of transnationalism, memory, subjecthood, dis/ability, temporal “drag,” chronic/illness, mimicry, and animality. A core examination of their work is bearing witness to the aftereffects of globalization through inhabiting new embodied and synthetic configurations—parafictional avatars: extended myths both woven together and ruptured by autobiography.

How does an avatar’s presence have the capacity to disarrange systems of prediction based upon alterity and threat?

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