黄山 Shan Huang

Feature image of the Restless Room, which shows a kid who is crouching beside a fireplace looking at the fire.

Shan Huang was born in Hunan Province, China. She currently lives in London. She received the Outstanding Graduate Honours in Digital Media Art from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, China, in 2021. She then studied at the Royal College of Art in the Department of Animation for her MA. She is currently exploring and refining her practice there.

With a growing interest in psychology, sociology, philosophy and multimedia, this artist thinks and creates experimental works by merging multiple disciplines and technologies such as painting; 3D animation; and virtual reality. Her work has been exhibited in Beijing, China; Brazil; and London, UK.

Shan Huang is particularly interested in the intuition of painting and the poetics of digital matter. Her main exploration at undergraduate level was interactive narratives in virtual reality space. Taking her personal experiences as a starting point, she explores the relationship between emotion, memory and time through virtual reality. At the same time, she uses drawing and hand-drawn animation as a way to reconcile with herself and explore the intuitive and subconscious. She thus organically combines these two components in her creative process.

Since her MA, she has been interested in the space itself in which we live; poetic space; the interaction between body and space. More recently, her research has focused on the interaction and affective relationship between body and space in virtual reality. The aim is to amplify the impact of the environment on the psyche and action through virtual reality spaces, evoking our perception of the neglected vicinity. The project is experimental in nature and thus attempts to break away from familiar structures and narratives, a challenge to traditional approaches.

Some of her work is time-based linear animation. However, in her attempts to explore interactive narratives, she has experienced the charm of 'play'. In this case, 'play' is an experiment in destruction and reorganisation. Thus, she has decided to shift her research to explore works that incorporate a more interactive and playful experience, and are more suited to the gallery space.

Trailer of Restless Room

About Restless Room | 关于不安的房间

不安的房间是一段虚拟空间（VR）中的体验，参与者可以在其中与空间互动。这里的空间承载着它的记忆。而空间中的体验者正是见证它存在的，与他对话的见证人。

在这个空间里，参与者会经过长廊来到一个房间，而房间的各个角落都藏着一些期待着被发现的“惊喜”，参与者通过用手柄触摸物体来触发这些“惊喜”。这其中有声音，有行为，也有通往其他四个房间的触发点，这四个房间如一段生命旅程的四个片段，也是四段记忆。

Restless Room is an experience in a virtual space (VR) in which participants can interact with the space. Here the space carries its memories. And the person experiencing the space is the witness to its existence, the one who talks to it.

In this space, the participant passes through a long corridor to a room in which there are “surprises” hidden in various corners that are waiting to be discovered, which are triggered by touching objects with the joystick. There are sounds, actions and trigger points to the other four rooms, which are like four fragments of a life journey and four memories.

Motivation and the image of HOME | 家的空间

从我孩童时期经历的各种各样的搬家和迁移开始，从一处搬到另一处，好像从来没有停息过。由此，让所有人怀念的“家”的空间在我看来成为了一个模糊而含混的概念。它是一个可以存放的空间，像是抽屉，有着硬朗而稳定的形状。也是休憩的场所，这时它的线条变成了弯曲的柔软棉被的形状。它是聚集声音的空间，我们在其中任由声音彼此交叉，尽可能的隔绝外部。它也可以是温度沾染在皮肤上的形状。房子经历的修改和迁移，它失去了一个明确的形象，但或许它本就不该有一个明确固定的形象，因为万物都已处在了流变之中。流变是冷漠的，是不可以保留的手中之沙。而与空间对话时在内心的回响并非是冷漠的。

所以来到伦敦的家中，引发了我对过往和当下这些与空间互动的内心回响，由此我想要用虚拟现实技术放大这段与空间互动的体验。

From the various moves and relocations I experienced as a child, from one place to another, there never seemed to be any stopping. As a result, the space that everyone misses as ‘home’ has become a vague and ambiguous concept to me. It is a space for storage, like a drawer, with a hard and stable shape. It is also a place to rest when its lines take on the shape of a soft, curved quilt. It is a space for gathering sounds, in which we allow them to cross each other, isolating the outside as much as possible. It can also be the shape of temperature staining the skin. The house has undergone modifications and migrations, and it has lost a definite image, but perhaps it should not have had a fixed image in the first place, because everything is already in flux. Flux is indifferent, the sand in the hand that cannot be kept. The echoes in the heart of a dialogue with space are not indifferent.

So coming to a new home in London triggered these internal reverberations of my past and present interactions with space, and I wanted to use virtual reality to amplify this experience of interaction with space.