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?