REVIEW Oct 2024 ‘Steph Huang: There is nothing old under the sun’ at esea contemporary

Jo Manby

the Fourdrinier Editor Jo Manby reviews the show ‘Steph Huang: There is nothing old under the sun’ at esea until 8 December 2024, which premiers a new work created during a residency in the Maker Space facilities at the University of Salford and co-commissioned by University of Salford Art Collection and esea contemporary. As part of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award (MTSA)’s National Touring Programme, the exhibition (which is supported by MTSA and Arts Council England) was shown at Standpoint, London 17 May-29 June 2024, and after esea contemporary, it will tour to Cross Lane Projects in Kendal in March 2025. Steph Huang is the 21st winner of the MTSA which is dedicated to emerging UK artists working in the field of sculpture with a focus on outstanding and innovative practice and work that demonstrates commitment to process or sensitivity to material. Huang covers all bases: she received her MA in sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 2021, she has exhibited widely already (a concurrent show at Tate Britain, London), and she excels in process-led work and meticulous handling of materials.

To enter the exhibition, ‘There is nothing old under the sun’ is to take a drift around the city (Paris, London, Manchester, Taipei), watching the universe turn through the eyes of the award winning artist Steph Huang, and be delighted by her re-envisioning of artefacts from the streets and the cocktail bars, the restaurants and the kitchens, dipping into the aesthetics of the food industry and rendering details gathered along the way via a wealth of processes, in each one of which she accomplishes significant depths of understanding and proficiency.

Huang has worked as a chef, and her passage through the city is equivalent to artistic foraging, whereby she collects sensory details and imagery. Her research technique is borrowed from the art group of the mid twentieth century, The Situationist International. The revolutionary group, headed up by social activist, writer and theorist Guy Debord, consisted of artists and writers who formed an alliance in Italy in 1957 and developed a Marxist/Surrealist critique of capitalist society (the ‘Society of the Spectacle’).

The Situationist International generated a means of contesting the spectacle of consumerist consumption with their practice of the dérive – drifting in an untethered, relaxed manner through the urban landscape, the pursuit of situations and moments experienced as a form of liberation and adventure, open to vivid sparks of ideas arising from the actual fabric of the streets, their objects, sights and sounds.

On first setting eyes on Huang’s sculpture, I was fascinated by the nuances of pristine presentation, delicate elegance and balance and offsetting of complementary but often opposing elements in her work, appearing influenced by the aesthetics of high quality cuisine:

“I have a deep appreciation for a well-prepared meal and I'm willing to travel to a restaurant just as I would for an exhibition. I admire the hard work, dedication, and attention to detail that goes into a dish,” Huang explained. “My experience as a chef certainly taught me a lot about tension and balance, and has influenced my work as an artist. While I may never have the opportunity to work in a Michelin-starred restaurant, I am grateful for the comparison of my artistic work to theirs!”

Transplanting research undertaken in the field back into the studio, it’s a matter of playful testing of form, material, colour, followed by the hard graft of the making – which can include metal cutting, welding, glass-blowing, carpentry, and a host of other techniques and craft applications.

While the main gallery at esea is pared back to house a series of self-contained works relating to a more interior viewpoint, the Communal Project Space at the front becomes a threshold where the world of the street outside – the continuous site of the drift, or the dérive of the International Situationists – overlaps with esea itself. A liminal space where the moonlight and starlight bathe the city at night and the sights of the Northern Quarter enter in through the plate glass windows, to the yellow lettering ‘esea’ at the entrance reflected on the photographic surface of the top of the artwork Drizzle Between Bricks (2024).

Here you will find the moon, as if captured in a frozen foil milk bottle top, in All of Space and Time and Their Contents (2024), created out of rings of ribbon-like mild steel and translucent handblown glass pooling blue at its centre, jutting out of the wall, way above head height.

Abstract steel lines of Things Which are Only Themselves (2024) emerge from the wall only to flip upside down and back in on themselves, curving wildly like the wind, or sound waves, or isobars.

There is a visual conceit in palest blush pink slats offset with green bamboo leaves reclining on the floor. Hundred Leaves a Blind (2024) registers a light, throwaway reference to the fact that the direct Mandarin Chinese translation of ‘blind’ (for a window) is ‘a hundred leaves’. This work, cool and sophisticated in its understated poeticism, is archetypal of Huang’s process – playing on words and meanings, expanding on a vague connection or thought, as light and fleeting as a bubble – and making it into a concrete object with the confidence of an experienced and highly talented artist and craftsperson. With Huang, the presentation is always immaculate.

Drizzle Between Bricks (2024), mentioned above, takes local ingredients and transforms them into a composite box like arrangement that refers to microclimate, industrial history, and the built environment Huang found herself in when she undertook a residency at The Maker Space at the University of Salford, Manchester.

This facility was established in partnership with Salford-based Morson Group, a world-leading engineering recruitment company. The university and Morson Group together take an active role in addressing the UK’s STEM shortages by inspiring young people and our students to consider a future career in STEM by learning real-world digital fabrication skills in their studies.

I asked Steph if her time spent in the Maker Space facilities at University of Salford had enhanced her working practice. ‘Yes, the school offers amazing facilities and provides students with considerable autonomy. Upon completing the training, you will be left alone with the machines. If I had studied there, I would have camped outside the door and tried to be there 24h/7.’

Drizzle Between Bricks (2024) comprises laser cut mild steel in a pattern recalling ironwork seen around the city; a monochrome photo of fungus spotted growing at the roadside printed onto a thin sheet of glass; and ball bearings that evoke the dynamics of social development, industry and change. I asked Huang what specific details observed around Manchester and Salford influenced the materials and forms used in Drizzle Between Bricks.

“The architectural facades in Northern Quarter and Ancoats (Anita Street) immediately captured my attention. I found myself drawn to the intricate decorative graphics and patterns adorning the robust metal structures. I’m also moved by the greenery around the Meadow near River Irwell in Salford, and enjoy the tranquil landscape as it stands in contrast to the bustle of the city. The arrangement of the bricks, stones, rain, and nature collectively contributes to the composition of this final commissioned work.”

Did the University of Salford Collection and esea contemporary commission facilitate any new direction in Huang’s work, or open up any new avenues of possibility?

“I think any opportunity to collaborate with a new institution or collection opens up different ways of thinking about my practice,” Huang replied. “The particularities of esea’s space certainly encouraged me to reimagine the exhibition in a new way. With the commission in particular, I wanted the work to reflect on the architectural facades of Manchester in tension with the tranquil landscapes of the surrounding Salford area.”

Screw Shells (2024), a version of Things Which are Only Themselves (2024), greets you as you turn the corner into the main gallery. Linear mild steel tipped with a bronze cast screw shell projects out of the curved wall. To the right is a vinyl lettering-meditation on the desire to cast off the cynicism of habit and see the world afresh, from writer, artist and photographer Luigi Ghirri (1943-92).

On the other side of this curved wall is Screw Shells in Two Dimensions (2024), a site-specific wallpaper digitally printed specially for the exhibition, and the exquisite Bubbling Up (2024), one of several light-based works using mild steel and hand-blown glass, such as Moon Exploration (2024) on the opposite side of the space. For Bubbling Up, the artist has observed the convex glass form of a typical outdoor lamp and subverted it by capturing it inside a steel lattice rather than have it bulge outwards.

Walking by I Am in a Pretty Pickle (2024), a sculpture that incorporates audio, the visitor can hear the noises of a street market in France intercut by a mouth crunching on pickles. The work is exquisite. A readymade pickle tin, process-printed in white, red and green, contains a speaker and battery underneath a patch of hand-dyed silk containing two pristine hand-blown glass pickles.

At the back of the room, one finds A Regular Arrangement (2024). A section of plywood that Huang had previously cut out some ovals from, and which was lying unused in her studio, is painted crabmeat or mushroom gill-pink, the ovals shaped like the looping of extra virgin olive oil dropped into a sauce, long, extended and with a habit of mutual exclusion and resistance, flocking and regrouping. There is a hint of the almost magnetic capacity of oil to stick to oil and water to stick to water. Skinny armatures are used to extend bronze cast shells into the air. I am told that when the wax moulds of the shells were still warm, Huang squeezed them in the palms of her hands to create these slightly alien forms. Huang is parsimonious with materials as a chef is with ingredients. Nothing maximalist to be seen here.

Behind A Regular Arrangement is The Gone Room (2024), where the upcurve of a champagne cup is counterpointed by the fizzy Artex padded surface of thickly textured wallpaper that mimics the quality of lemon and lime pith and the hues of their rind.

“As a child, I spent many weekends with my grandparents. I vividly remember a room in their house that was adorned with elaborate sculptural wallpapers, standing out from the rest of the house,” says Huang. “Recently, I revisited the now dilapidated house and felt compelled to remove the wallpaper. It was then that I discovered that the room had been specially decorated for my parents' wedding. The memories and history attached to that room inspired the creation of The Gone Room.”

Opposite A Regular Arrangement is Every Day Seems a Little Longer (2024), similar in its feather-light reference to the food industry: it is made of very pale pink powder coated mild steel and plywood, bronze, hand blown glass, and a found white kitchen rack.

Wood and Stone (2024), near the exit of the gallery space, consists of a panel of UV printed smoked glass, mild steel brackets that set it away from the wall and allow a passage of air, and a stone, placed on one of the brackets for a sense of balance. The smoked glass bears traces of cross-sections of tree trunks (Huang took photos of a woodpile while staying in Bordeaux, having set off on a bicycle to fetch croissants for breakfast). Finding that there was too much detail in the individual cross-sections, she abraded the photos by hand to achieve the desired effect.

This type of process, honing an idea until it reaches an aesthetic balance is a matter of presentation, cleanliness, pristine clarity, perfectionism, finessing, elegance, spartan spareness, tactility.  Weight, mass, texture, ‘bite’, softness, resistance, balancing, offsetting, leveraging – all these elements are taken into account and are part of Huang’s repertoire.

I wondered whether the nature of Huang’s particular practice and her experiences of living in Taiwan and the UK mean that she identifies with a form of transnational identity, and if so, what came first, her experience of moving geographically, or a compulsion to drift creatively across demarcations.

“Taiwan is vastly different from any European country,” Huang replied. “As someone born and raised on an island, I have always had a deep-seated desire to embark on adventures and explore the world. Drifting has been served as my method of comprehending urban movements and the psychological interplay between human behaviour and the surrounding environment.”

Huang describes making “a conscious effort to explore a variety of geographical locations, especially every corner easily reachable by car in Taiwan. It's a mountainous island which offers stunning natural areas that are perfect for hiking, which I thoroughly enjoy. The seaside towns on the west coasts offer a distinct charm of their own. In contrast to the cheerful atmospheres of Margate or Brighton, these towns are characterised by the presence of cement fish farming ponds.”

Huang is possibly referencing these pools in the work Willow Pond (2024), which occupies the slightly shaded area at the back of the esea contemporary gallery space. Rectangular in form, it consists of a lightbox of smoky, UV printed Perspex, the same hand-dyed Chartreuse-coloured silk seen in I Am in a Pretty Pickle, and a sumptuous milky blue hand-blown glass globule. It could also potentially reference the star-crossed lovers of the Blue Willow fable of Willow Pattern lore, copied from the Chinese by English pottery producers since the eighteenth century. The lovers traverse a sea, and are subsequently transformed into birds.

As if to draw out the hint of transformation, when the work Willow Pond was being packed away at its previous iteration at Standpoint in London, an exquisite moth had wandered in between the folds of the silk and was only discovered when it arrived at esea contemporary. Whatever layer of interpretation the visitor chooses to make, there is no denying that Steph Huang’s exhibition provides a rich seam for the imagination.

https://www.eseacontemporary.org/exhibition/there-is-nothing-old-under-the-sun