your voice is in every shell

murmurs gallery, Los Angeles, 23 January - 8 March 2025

Milan Kundera defines nostalgia in Ignorance as such: “The Greek word for “Return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” Loss inherently represents concepts of exponential degradation: the loss of memory, the nonexistence of home, the loss of family members and loved ones (who were at “home”).



While loss is most often perceived as an absence, stephanie mei huang’s solo at murmurs LA, your voice is in every shell, paradoxically manifests loss in sounds, events, and objects of interpassivity that retain a presence within their own cosmology. A shell is a cavity; a negative space that holds otherwise impalpable whispers. It serves as a filter for eardrums, magnifying ambient frequencies typically lost to their milieu.

Kinetic hand-drums clap and rattle behind the painted sheepskin of the drum face, depicting seashells as various forms of exoskeletons for mythological horses, while simultaneously providing a veil or shell for the  internal kinetic circuitry. In Landline, a figure presses her ear to a cordless seashell, while the other uses a seashell as a beckoning horn. Performance ephemera from the video rid of poison become a central unicorn effigy of the exhibition, lounging on a lobster trap found washed up in Malibu.


In studies of the aesthetics of nostalgia, Svetlana Boym theorizes that though restorative nostalgia seeks to literally reconstruct the lost homeland through perceived nationalist truths, reflective nostalgia makes no attempt to be truthful, delaying the physical homecoming to dwell in a prolonged state of longing and fragmentation, sometimes as a mechanism of survival. your voice is in every shell is not an attempt of an accurate retelling, but of a shell that continuously sheds and rearranges itself and its relationalities.

how to hobble a young horse

PULPO GALLERY, Murnau am Staffelsee, 16 July - 28 August 2022

“That the domain of the animal is treated as a zone of deferral means that animality subtends a great deal below the white human man at the top, who in spite of his own superior position, can be dragged down by his own queer association.” - Mel Y. Chen, “Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Afftect”

The horse has become imprecise. She is at once weaponized and abstracted as the symbol of the “free” and the “wild,” at once domesticated with a developed backbone to support human weight. She is at once simianized and anthropomorphized.


how to hobble a young horse explores the slippery terrains of animality, constraint, and consent, in both taking on the figure of the Chinese cowboy/girl and the horse in the American (U.S.) West. huang shifts animalities, in becoming them, rejecting them, and transmuting them. The body of work includes performance, film/video, sculpture, painting and photography.

The exhibition is named after huang’s most recent performance, in which huang’s cowboy avatar Stirrup Steph with her animatronic horse, Diamond, re-enacts and distorts a found video tutorial of a cowboy demonstrating in disconcertingly domineering and gendered language “how to hobble a young horse.” Stirrup Steph inscribes themselves into the script in the way that they inscribe themselves into the frontier of the American West, a mythological space they recognize as biopolitically, historically, and thus, residually as not belonging to them. Through racial melancholia, how do we navigate new conditions from which we speak and new ways of inhabiting our subjectivities? How can we begin to consider melancholia as a realistic and productive response to the insidious underbelly of American history?


This eponymously titled exhibition self-animalizes while also re-animalizes and suggests, at the shift away from Stirrup Steph, that huang is perhaps not a cowboy, but a horse, or both. A carousel horse finds kinesis through a windshield wiper motor. Stirrup Steph’s animatronics horse, Diamond, neighs if you pat her. A roping dummy is topped with a ceramic ox/horse/dragon-head rather than a steer head. In taking on different reimagined animalized subjectivities, Stirrup Steph acknowledges, plays with, and reclaims the submissive drive of the cowboy and the American West.

(self-portraits as) neither donkey nor horse

Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles
Book & Printed Matter Lab
June 26 – August 1 2021
Curated by Allison C. Smith

The exhibition ‘(self-portraits as) neither donkey nor horse’, centers, celebrates, obscures para-narrativism and auto-theory: a critical practice deeply rooted in queer research and practice. It is through the vehicle of drag, self-portraiture and biography that huang erodes the violent mythologies that perpetuate expansionist, exceptionalist, and settler colonial narratives, while excavating forgotten, erased, and partial histories. ‘(self-portraits as) neither donkey nor horse’, while speaking to huang’s various and fractured avatarisms, prioritizes the narrative of Stirrup Steph— the youngest and first woman to be inaugurated into the Cowboy Artists of America (CAA), a brotherhood dedicated to conserving the culture and history of the old west.



The tall and true tale of Stirrup Steph, and huang's splitting avatars, begs the question: could "cowboy drag," a form of racialized, gendered, affective drag, not unlike code-switching, an embodied passibility, provide a mimetic form of deception/self-preservation? Could it scramble systems of prediction projected upon huang’s body/identity? What are the alluring possibilities that result from racial melancholia: self-contradicting negotiations with pleasure and pain, multiple selves, identity/dis-identity formation?

In the wake of the 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings, ‘(self-portraits as) neither donkey nor horse’ addresses biopolitical and xenophobic rhetoric that finds its roots in19th century “yellow peril” and is regurgitated/perpetuated in a 21st century anti-Chinese discourse surrounding Covid-19. huang’s work speaks to an urgency of visualizing melancholia and the exposure of grief— a melancholic fixation on that which excludes you: the implausibility of the Stirrup Steph.

white vegetable

white vegetable is a series of single-take 16mm films that explore the racially melancholic processes of fixation, ingestion, repulsion, and regurgitation. In Chinese, the direct translation for napa cabbage (baicai 白菜) is white vegetable.  In Melancholy and Race, Anne Anlin Cheng remarks: “since the melancholic subject experiences resentment and denigration for the lost object with which he or she is identifying, the melancholic ends up administering to his or her own self-denigration.” She continues to elaborate that ìthe melancholic is not melancholic because he or she has lost something but because he or she has introjected that which he or she now reviles,” resulting in the melancholic “choking on...the hateful and loved thing he or she just devoured.”