Cindy Huang 黄馨贤 is an artist whose practice is informed by her lived experience as tauiwi, a New Zealander of Chinese descent, with her research drawing upon the legacies and traditions of both cultures and lands. Her work poetically engages with specific social histories and narratives, as she seeks to explore ideas of manakitanga—exchange, generosity and adjacency.
For her first international solo exhibition, Landings, Huang presents and extends her recent work Tracing a gilded trail (2023-). This expansive, floor-based work comprises some 1000 sculptural elements in glazed porcelain, hand-made and painted by the artist. Dispersed across the entire gallery, these lily flowers explore the relationship of the body to the land. These flowers were supposedly brought by Chinese sojourners working in the Victorian-era gold rushes in Aotearoa New Zealand (prevalent across Australia during similar periods) and often connected with processes of mourning in present day. Through this gesture, the artist evokes what it is for bodies to pass, to be buried within, and connected with land as Tangata Tiriti—people of the treaty.
Alongside this work, Huang has produced a new modular sculptural installation comprising hand-made ceramic tiles embedded with pāua shells, a species of abalone unique to New Zealand and distinct for their multi-coloured interior. Through this work, the artist connects with her family’s small-town fish and chips and Chinese restaurant and takeaway, complicating their connectivity to the lands and waters of New Zealand.
Cindy Huang lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Selected recent exhibitions include Pleasure Garden, Objectspace, Christchurch (2025); Offering, Hastings Art Gallery, Hastings (2024); Tracing a gilded trail, Sumer, Auckland (2023); Cindy Huang, Te Atamira, Queenstown (2023); Nova, Sumer, Auckland (2023); Twin Cultivation, Satellites, Auckland (2022); A Footnote on New Zealand History, Corban Estate Arts Centre, Auckland (2021); and The Beaglehole’s Problem, Meanwhile, Wellington (2020).
Cindy Huang is an interdisciplinary artist whose evocative installations and social art projects explore the themes of exchange, ancestry, and the often-overlooked histories of Chinese migration in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her major works—such as Tracing a Gilded Trail at Sumer, Auckland—have garnered critical attention for their sensitive engagement with historical narratives and their material poetry, marking her as a significant contemporary artist to watch in the New Zealand art scene.
Gertrude Contemporary is a non-profit contemporary art organisation in Preston South, Naarm/Melbourne, with an additional project space, Gertrude Glasshouse, in nearby Collingwood. Established in 1983 as 200 Gertrude Street in Fitzroy, it pioneered Australia’s first combined gallery and studio complex and remains one of the country’s longest-running centres for experimental art.
