STEPHANIE MEI HUANG

“It’s not gazing but grazing.” - Mike Hoolboom“

To give flesh to the multisensory cinema I theorized and to emphasize the mutuality of perceiving and being perceived, I also drew from...embodied empathy, or bodily mimesis, as one of the ways we feel along with the beings on the screen.” - Laura U. Marks

yellow porcelain ii is a hybrid film/performance/sculpture and ritualized demonstration of self-arming through the materiality of the tactile apparatus/medium of 16mm film and clay. For huang, film is memory; film gains scratches, digital media corrupts, and analog videos demagnetize. 16mm, in this sense, is a skin that retains the memory of being alive. huang’s 16mm films utilize moving image film as a membrane of memory, enacting, quite literally, that only light may expose these intimate social performances to reveal what the film (memory) holds.

The work is a part of a series titled self-armature, which combines 16mm film from and outside the Los Angeles Police academyand different bodies of clay. With yellow porcelain ii, it is specifically 10 kilograms of porcelain, a haptic and delicate material knownfor its east-west migration. Yellow ochre in the form of mineral pigment arrives, one of the most ancient and stable pigments used by humankind, historically used to signify a return to the earth, or a rebirth. In the durational performance that ensues, huang becomes an earthly vessel. The vessel, as a metaphor, is a porcelain barrier, but also oft-used to describe the messenger. In using clay armor and camera to initiate spectatorship, yellow porcelain ii challenges surveillance dynamics to look at violence as a performative structure, rooted in the very important question of whether or not self-protection and autonomy are futile during an era of mass data surveillance and state monopoly of violence.