"My Mirrored Realm”：The Free Territory of Huang Ying's Art

Huang Du

Unlike many other female artists who work singly around gender issues, Huang Ying chooses her body and images to be the vessel of artistic expression, and has subjectively weaved out a so-called “simulated mirrored realm of reality”. Combining hand shooting and post-production, Huang has re-defined the boundary between the real and the simulated, the natural and the artificial. Within two years she added to her oeuvre a refreshing new body of works. 

The “mirrored realm” in Huang Ying’s art, not so much as a quest for the self, is more of a free terrain fabricated in the artist’s mind, a utopia that she has long aspired to, an idealized place realized through technical aesthetics, a simulated spiritual home. In such practice Huang attempts to spot new possibilities at the junction of the self and the world, the real and the simulated, time and space. Facing a world where the self gradually dissolves, Huang questions the meaning of existence. She is fascinated by the body, a highly personal, and private medium, and by the body’s infinite malleability. She transports the body into a simulated realm, creating a blurry terrain between dream and reality, much akin to the poetic aesthetics in traditional Chinese ink paintings. The iceberg, the Great Wall, or the icy oceans in her photographs are spiritual terrains that could be both travelled and dwelled upon. Huang Ying’s self-restoration is the rediscovery and rebuild of the self. Setting the body as the starting point, she strips it off its layers of meanings, from the natural body to the social, from the physiological body to the artistic. In this sense, she builds a nuanced realm in which the simulated becomes the real and the real becomes the simulated. It is here that the artist finds her own free terrain. As it is in the artist’s own words, “My work is a gradual process of extraction, an ongoing process of purifying the expression. ” These summerize her artistic language.

Huang Ying regards the nature and the self an inseparable whole, the body, an extension of nature, while nature, a mirror of the bodily existence. Man connects the dots between nature and the self through living in reality. Such complementary relationship forms the Chinese outlook of nature. The disruption, repetition and unrest in her images simply show that the artist has a strong bio-political consciousness—questioning the relationships between the subject and the object, human and nature, criticizing the ever-growing human desires.