Huan Wang

Skin of the River Thame, 2023. cotton knitted T-shirt fabric, mud dye. Hanging from the wall under Battersea Bridge at low tide.

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.

Skin of the River, 2023 – 140cm x 70cm. cotton T-shit fabric, Thames river mud stains, mudlark hemp rope

Textile will be designed in different widths to meet the needs of making clothing, curtains, and quilts. I used this T-shirt fabric and cut it to the body size. The middle of the fabric was cut out in the shape of a vest and became a filter for getting Thames clay.

Skin and cloth are both fragile elements that sometimes emerge from construction gaps.

Their fragile leftovers left transient traces,

Presenting a kind of ambiguous, anonymous body.

In the name "Thames", it may have meant "dark".

Brown is the color that supports lives.

It is a sign that nutrients are well mixed.

Mud is the color of the river, its body, and its name.

In February 2023, I collected some mud from the stairs on the embankment, and they were very clean clay after draining. But the next day, the tide took them all away, and I had to filter the topsoil from the riverbed for traces of clay. It must have been a gift to me from the river, an invitation to be near, a way of gaining knowledge.

'They need to breath', 2023 –

Medium:

Thames river topsoil, river mud, paper clay, cotton knitted fabric, nails

Size:

20cm x 20cm

Belly of the river, 2023 – thames river mud, cotton gray cloth 140cm x 70cm

'Touching the belly', 2023 – Thames riverbed topsoil, plaster, clay, cotton yarn, ink. 40cm x 27cm

Touching the belly, video, 0'49'', 2023 – Location: under the Battersea bridge

Self-healing 01, 2023 – Cotton gauze, silk, marker ink. Surgical suture stitch.15cm x 20cm.

Self-healing 02, 2023 – Cotton gauze, cotton gray cloth, silk, marker ink. Surgical suture stitch. 15cm x 20cm.

Screws and nuts collected from Thames riverside, Battersea park road and Victoria station, mostly at the traffic light junction, where buildings are being refurbished.