Photo Vision, Cities, and Glitch Art: In Conversation with Jingyao Huang
Photo of Jingyao Huang by Lanyi Gao. Courtesy of the artist.
Jingyao Huang (b. 1995, China) is a visual artist based in New York and Guangzhou. She received her BFA in Photography and Video at the School of Visual Arts in 2019 and her MFA in Fine Arts at the same school in 2023. Huang’s practice plays with the conventions and boundaries of photography, testing the expansion of photography's language through material forms. In her work, photographs are dismantled and reassembled through collages, sculptures, installations, and site-specific projects. Huang’s works have been exhibited internationally in galleries, including TheBlanc Art Space, The Bridge Arts Foundation, Latitude Gallery, and Ki Smith Gallery. Most recently, she participated in the group exhibition Living Room Rhapsody at Allen Street Gallery in New York. I spoke with Huang from her home in Guangzhou, China, about two of her recent sculpture series.
Jo Minhinnett: You originally studied photography, and now you mainly work in acrylic. How has your relationship with image-making changed?
Jingyao Huang: When I first started photography, I learned how to make a beautiful and perfect image on fine paper mounted on a clean wall, and I always wanted to mess it up. Photography is really beautiful, but why is beautiful the only way out? Yes, photography is a quick way to store personal memory. But to me, when you take the photo, it's kind of dead. It freezes that moment, and you don't know what is before or after. What I really wanted was to put one picture into a multi-dimensional space and to provide more context.
Later, I tried printing photographs on different materials because I wanted the image to jump out of fine art paper. I like acrylic because it looks clean, and I can stack and assemble acrylic sheets in a way that challenges us to see the world differently, just like the glass elements in a camera lens.
Jingyao Huang. Chaotic Data Fences, Baraka, and the Cityscape #2 (2022). Photo UV print on acrylic, 40 x 15 x 5 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
JM: What have you discovered when working with plastic?
JH: It goes back to 2019. I decided to return to China after finishing my bachelor's degree because of the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic and my visa. I was running around like crazy, trying to find factories and suppliers to have enough material for my art. You know Epson printers? The good ones are often hard to find in China, especially in Guangzhou. If I needed to print, I had to go to Shanghai, which I didn’t want to do. I wanted to print photographs myself.
Accidentally, I found a factory close to my home and was introduced by some friends. They have the biggest UV printer I have ever seen and other printers too. I began doing crazy experiments at that factory. The manager was incredibly supportive and didn't charge me for materials most of the time. She was happy to give me acrylic, paper, wood, everything. She just threw the materials at me and asked me to explore the limits of that machine.
Jingyao Huang. Echo from 2023.08.02–08.22 Imaginary Playground (2023). Acrylic plastic, 23 x 28 x 7 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
JM: It's like you were doing a residency at the factory.
JH: Yes! I did a lot of printing there, and slowly, I found out that acrylic was the material I wanted to use. Before that, it was glass, but glass is so fragile in transportation, and it's not easy to make glass collages. And even before that, I was printing on image transfer paper and making collages with rice paper, which were still two-dimensional. The three-dimensional expansion of my work started to happen at that factory.
JM: You've been developing a body of work titled Echo from... since 2021. What was the inspiration behind this sculpture series?
JH: The series is like a diary. The sculptures were a way to document memories, fragments, and everything else surrounding me. In the titles, the dates refer to the start and end of making each sculpture, and I would sometimes add words to highlight what I was thinking about in that period. For example, the piece Echo from 2023.08.02-08.22 Imaginary Playground originated from seven songs from one of my favorite singers. He wrote a song and then created seven different versions of it, each with a different emotion. I kept listening to these songs to make the piece. I wanted to experience how to materialize music into sculpture.
Another piece, Echo from 2023.11.15-11.27 Untitled, is actually my family portrait. The blue is my dad, the yellow is my mom, and the green is me. During that time, my mom had knee surgery, and we were not a close family. I’ve always had a good relationship with my mom and dad respectively, but they are always arguing with each other. When I went back to China last year, there was a lot of fighting because my mom didn't want to go to the hospital. My dad and I took her anyway, and that's when we found out her knee was broken. It was the first time in ten years that the three of us were sitting in one room and talking to each other normally. On the right side of the sculpture, I left an extra yellow piece to represent my mom because after she left the hospital, she immediately wanted to travel again, even though the doctor told her to stay home for half a year. I wanted to show that part of her was already somewhere else.
JM: What does your creative process look like? Where do you start?
JH: I start with thinking first, just sitting there looking at the materials on the cart in my studio. I collect different materials from school, on the streets, and from Canal Plastics, which is a store in New York that sells $5 bags of waste plastic for artists. I think about the stories behind all these materials left behind by someone. Finding them somehow creates a connection between us, and that's where the new story comes from. Then, I tune into the memory that occurs to me at that moment.
Jingyao Huang. Chaotic Data Fences, Baraka, and the Cityscape #4 (2023). Photo UV print on acrylic, 54 x 30 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
JM: Do you approach your work as abstraction, or do you have clear images you want to convey in the final work?
JH: It depends on how a snippet of memory or the image of that memory impresses me. In my series Echo from..., it was more of a quick process of transforming the essence of the memory into three dimensions. You don't see a lot of photography work because all of the structures and geometry I built, I formed automatically.
For my series Chaotic Data Fences, Baraka, and the Cityscape, I took sunrise and sunset photographs from my rooftop in Guangzhou during the quarantine. It was the only place I could go. I was using an old memory card that had a glitch inside, so every time I would input and output the card, the card itself created different glitches in the pictures.
Since I like to document and screenshot everything, I wanted to capture these changing images made by the memory card. I transformed the glitch pictures into sculpture to show the many different forms an image can take and how images might be altered by external factors. In that series, you will see the same buildings over and over again because I took pictures at the same location every time. I moved into this building in 2000, so that's a landscape I've been watching for 20 years.
Jingyao Huang. Study of the Bridge #2, (2024). Photo UV print on acrylic, 11.5 x 3.5 x 5.25 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
JM: In your bridge study works, the surfaces of your sculptures are UV printed with photos of architectural details like bridge columns. What attracts you to these details?
JH: When I did the bridge studies, I was actually preparing for a bigger work called A Swimming Tower in the Air. My intention was to document New York’s daily life and make it into an installation. I was living next to the Brooklyn Bridge so I started there. I love architectural features, especially in New York, because they're so quiet. They never make any sound, yet you're still surrounded by noise. I love and hate cities at the same time. New York is so noisy, but it's also convenient, with so much good food, and all my friends are there. Sometimes, I want to escape the city for a little while. My works, just like me, are oscillating between noise and silence.
JM: When taking the pictures, is it spontaneous or do you plan them out?
JH: I never plan. OK, well, I plan only if I need to make money. Otherwise, I love to clear my mind by just walking down the street and taking pictures of the city.
Jingyao Huang. Chaotic Data Fences, Baraka, and the Cityscape #1 (2022). Photo UV print on acrylic, 34 x 60 x 5 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
JM: Would you say you are inspired by a particular place?
JH: Yes, all spaces. When I'm in one space, I think about a memory from another place. My mind is free to pass. In that way, my sculpture is open. When building my pieces, I always want to escape from the city mentally.
JM: Is there anything else you'd like us to know about your work?
JH: Yes. How I organized the geometric pieces in my sculptures is inspired by Chinese traditional patterns and their evolution across different dynasties. The patterns deconstruct a living thing like a fish, or everyday objects like mud and rope, into geometric forms. From the Stone Age onwards, people throughout history in China documented their memories and made these images simple and abstract. Photography needs this kind of evolution too. This inspired me to transform figurative photography into geometric structures.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
