MLitt Fine Art Practice School of Fine Art
Yasi Huang
The inspiration for my work comes entirely from gossip—not only the gossip that has happened to me, but also stories I’ve heard from people around me. I have a deep curiosity about human nature, and I often find myself late at night chewing over different events, trying to untangle what really happened and understand the psychological states of everyone involved.
At the same time, I am deeply fascinated by divination and fortune-telling. I see these practices as our earliest form of psychological counseling, full of unspeakable secrets and emotional undercurrents. Because the content I wish to share often involves privacy or even taboos, I choose to connect these stories with symbols drawn from mythology, mysticism, and the visual language of fortune-telling. I also incorporate small, memorable details from the stories—like beards, tattoos, nails, or belts.
As a result, I often receive messages or phone calls from the people involved after I post a work on social media. Through this process, I aim to create a set of visual metaphors inviting the viewers to decode.
Welcome to My Puppet Show
In this exhibition, I envisioned my exhibition as a puppet theater stage, because for me, both the life stories I have experienced and those I have collected from various places feel like different plays being performed on a stage. However, rather than simply documenting reality, I incorporated various symbols and different character forms in my usual creative style to create metaphors. I aim for my work to appear absurd yet narrative-driven, with a sense of tension. In this exhibition, I have only displayed raw canvases and cut-out pieces, as I believe they evoke a feeling of transitioning from imagery into reality, aligning well with the puppet theater aesthetic I seek to convey.
