Serena Huang is a Chinese artist who lives and works in London, she works with video, installation, text, sculpture, and performance, creating speculative narratives in her imagined fictitious worlds.

Interested in mythology, the slippage of history, and the theatricality of present-day reality. Her practice is an ongoing world-building event that evolves and develops by using recurring elements, anecdotes, and artefacts.

Huang's work questions the staging of what is real, alongside what is currently seen as valuable in today's society. She employs theatricality as a bridge between materials, to act as an anchor and to join previously unrelated things creating new stories and experiences.

Excluding any human presence in the installation, Huang’s work enhances the performativity of everyday objects and materials, highlighting and dramatising the familiar into a personal narrative. (see bio)

The title of the show is taken from a line in SKY EMPTY, a Zoom play written by Serena Huang in 2020(available here). It is common in her practice that one work speaks to another. However, this exhibition is organised as an installation of scenes and props and although the two works are related they have very different forms and narratives.

---

"I am not making a linear story or anything near. I am making fragments of scenes and narrations that happen to be in the same reality. I take elements in Sky Empty and use them as starting points for some work, in a different material medium. This creates new narratives and different but related dialogue. It's like an evolution of original principles.

You can say I make installations, or I prefer a mise-en-scène, I am interested in how the story can be told by an arrangement of objects. I take elements in Sky Empty and use them as starting points for some work, being in another medium and being with other new scenes, it forms a different dialogue and this is the basis of the show."

This exhibition is partly funded by New Contemporaries as part of NCDF 2022.