Huan Wang

Huan Wang works across text, textiles, installation and film. She studies and lives in London as a cultural traveller, telling the connection between human and other existences in the modern urban space in the way of poetry and material narrative.

Wang's textile works are partly emotional fragments and partly document her natural experiences in urban spaces. It sometimes is a line of poetry, or a name, calling for a past that has not gone far. Her cultural narration extends to some waste in the city. During the creative process, Huan maintains a genuine, physical connection with the collected objects, allowing her to preserve their inherent sense of time. By touching the materials, she solidifies her personal narrative, infusing it with a tangible quality.

Huan Wang's artistic practice conveys the sense of being as a human and explores the intersection of strength and fragility. While carefully and equally approaching the fragile fringes of the natural world, pointing to the neglected marginal and subaltern existence of human society is a common theme in her textile work. She pays attention to the fragile corners of those solid order systems, often collecting fallen fasteners and falling leaves from street trees while roaming the city.

Focusing on the symbolism and provenance of objects, Wang likes to juxtapose two conflicting materials. In self-healing, 2023, the yarn of the cotton gauze is carefully pulled out, and then stitched back with the technique of surgical suture, stitching the silk and cotton together, leaving Japanese Boro stitches on the silk side.

Wang considers the direct presentation and viewing of the body to be a form of violence and a sensory attack on the viewer. Avoiding the direct expression of the body is a common visual feature in her textile work. In order to awaken the more universal existence and point to the absent anonymous body, Wang replaces the absent body through the traces left by the interaction between the body and materials.