Someplace: Peishan Huang, Yasmine Anlan Huang and Xi Li
“Someplace” is a three-person exhibition featuring works by Yasmine Anlan Huang, Peishan Huang and Xi Li. Each artist has drawn from personal and collective experiences to create new realities through visual media. The show is on view at LATITUDE Gallery, which is located at 64A Bayard Street, from July 5 through August 6.
Xi Li, Yasmine Anlan Huang, and Peishan Huang have all used imagery to make sense of the world around them, employing disparate materials to create surreal tableaux that contain both people and the places that they inhabit. An initially unassuming object—like a brown Victorian lampshade affixed with a dangling braid or a glowing orb topped with a bunch of grapes—can become deeply profound after we stare at it for long enough. And its physical attributes (such as the scalloped curve of that lampshade or the lucid luminescence of the aforementioned orb) can prompt us to wonder about that item’s history and why it ended up in the place that it did.
Yasmine Anlan Huang’s practice incorporates objects, which she uses to explore society and spectacle, in various ways. Her oeuvre references everything from Tinder to J-Pop to classical literature, making these cultural references to explore distinctions between “innocence and violence, the past and the future, the sublime and the absurd,” as Huang writes in her artist statement. The multidisciplinary creator uses film, photography, installation, and writing to prompt questions about complex topics, like migration and femininity, in surreal ways. For example, Yasmine Anlan Huang’s multimedia sculpture A Modern Fetish uses a clam-shaped vintage lampshade, an embroidery hoop, polyester ribbon, and the words “premature death”—which she hand-embroidered onto a vintage 1980’s handkerchief—“to examine how Victoriana circulated, evolved, and parallelly developed between the US and Japan.” Seeing such commonplace things—like a ribbon and a lampshade—juxtaposed with one another helps us see these everyday items in a new light.
Similarly, Peishan Huang uses ready-made commodities to question seemingly quotidian phenomena. The artist snaps photographs with innovative compositions; her images combine things like glass lighting fixtures, plastic fruit, and round tables, which work together to create dreamlike spaces that are awash with pastel hues. Huang uses these items to emotionally connect with the viewer and examine the relationships that people have with the objects around them. Drawing from her upbringing in Dali, Yunnan, China, Huang incorporates both cosmopolitan and natural elements into her work to “highlight the contemporary experiences of minority groups living in the urban landscape,” as Huang told Canvas Rebel Magazine in 2023.
Using archival material and personal recollections, Xi Li also makes images that contemplate both personal and communal experiences. Her photographs are disjunctive assemblages that point to the distorted nature of memory: In one photograph, we see a chandelier hanging above an unpopulated room, and in another, we see a lamp with a skewed shade sitting atop a wooden desk. Something about these images feels transitionary, and we can project our own feelings into these rooms that aren’t inhabited by people.
All three artists reference a myriad of personal experiences and social phenomena to conjure surreal vignettes that are neither completely real nor completely imaginary. The exhibition shows how artists are able to use experiments with light, color, and composition to birth new narratives.
-Isis Davis-Marks
Peishan Huang (b.1994, Dali, Yunnan, China) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in Multidisciplinary Fine Art from Maryland Institute College of Art (2021) and a BA in Advertising from Communication University of China (2018). Her recent work ranges from photography to sculpture to installation, exploring images and the spaces they inhabit, as well as the emotions pinned to objects and spaces. Peishan’s works have been exhibited internationally, including M+B Gallery in Los Angeles, LATITUDE Gallery in New York, Chambers Fine Art in New York, Inna Art Space in New York, Three Shadows Photography Art Center in Beijing, Gene Gallery in Shanghai, Times Art Museum in Chengdu, Advertising Museum of China in Beijing, MP Birla Millennium Art Gallery in London, and Richard Riggs Gallery in Baltimore. Peishan has received Mount Royal Commencement Award (2022) and Gold-Stern Emerging Artist Award (2022). She has also completed Guerrilla War Artist Residency (2020) in Shanghai, China.
Yasmine Anlan Huang (b.1996, Guangzhou, China) is an artist and writer migrating from cities to cities. Diving into the complexities of ingénue or shōjo archetype across diverse cultures, her works dedicate to uncover hidden power structures and decolonize storytelling. Huang's works have been featured internationally, including Whitney Biennial 2024, Power Station of Art, Peckham24, HART Haus, Tabula Rasa Gallery, with solo or duo exhibitions at Floating Projects, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Seoul National University Woosuk Gallery and Goethe-Institut Hong Kong (forthcoming). She has been awarded residencies in Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Wassaic Project, Penland School of Craft, among others. Her writings and translations appeared in Heichi Magazine, p-articles, SAMPLE Mag, and many other platforms. Her debut book of poems and essays, Love of the Colonizer, has been published by Accent Sisters.
Xi Li (b. 1995, Suzhou, China) is an artist who works with photography, video, and installation to focus on the process of image-making, narrative shifts, and nature of preservation within history and image culture both collectively and individually. Drawing from a fusion of personal perspective, multicultural background, historical archives, images, artifacts, Li uses methods of construction, simulation, intervention and refabrication in her studio, to consider the unstable harmony between actual and fictive recollections of the past, and to blur the lines in between, and to reconstruct images and narratives. Li has exhibited internationally in François Ghebaly in Los Angeles, AMANITA and LATITUDE Gallery in New York City, MadeIn Gallery in Shanghai and others. Li is the recipient of Aperture 2023 Creator Labs Photo Fund. Her self-published book Traces of Invisibilities has been shortlisted for Photo 2020 x Perimeter International Photobook Prize. Li earned a Bachelor of Design from Pratt Institute and an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art. Li is now living in New York and participating in the artist residency at Silver Art Projects.
