Tianyang Huang
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11
- 4 min read
Tianyang Huang is an artist based in London. She works with handmade paper along with materials like plaster and metal powders. Her pieces are formed, taken apart, and rebuilt, sometimes going through several stages before they settle into their final shape. The body appears in her work through parts and surfaces rather than full figures. In “Ravfà’s Body is in Fragments,” the installation is reassembled each time it’s shown, so it is never exactly the same. “Habitat” was made with many hands working together at once, giving the structure a shared physical presence.
Q: What first drew you to paper as a way to explore the body and its transformations?
A: The first time I integrated paper into my body as part of an artistic process was born from the desire to explore a symbolic language capable of crossing the boundary between matter and identity.
The inspiration comes from Chinese funerary traditions, in which paper effigies are intimately connected to the concepts of life and death.
In China, these effigies are shaped into multiple forms — animals, people, everyday objects — and then burned as offerings to the ancestors.
This way of using paper deeply moved me: through it, it is possible to give form to anything, suspending its original function as a simple material and transforming it into a pure symbolic vehicle.
I chose to merge paper with my own body in order to inscribe myself within this context as well, exploring my existence and the relationship between spirit and matter.
Q: You mix xuan paper with industrial materials. How do you find balance between tradition and invention?
A: I believe that the balance between xuan paper and industrial materials lies in the tension between the organic and the artificial.
Today, these two realms no longer exist as separate realities — they coexist and intertwine within our daily experience, shaping our perception of the world in increasingly complex ways. Through this combination, I seek to reflect on and investigate the contemporary condition, in which tradition and technology continuously contaminate and transform each other.
Xuan paper, as a traditional medium of Chinese painting, is at once a cultural symbol and a sign of my identity; it represents for me the dimension of memory, continuity, and rootedness.
Choosing it as the main material and putting it in dialogue with industrial and mechanical elements means reinterpreting this tradition in a contemporary key — not as a static heritage, but as a living matter, capable of transformation and of engaging with the present.
In this way, culture becomes a dynamic, open field, traversed by temporal and material stratifications.
Q: Your works often move between destruction and renewal. Is that rhythm something you seek or something that happens on its own?
A: Both.
Through the autonomous behavior of paper fibers, I seek to evoke the natural processes of microorganisms — growth, transformation, and dissolution — while, on a broader level, I intervene to define composition, materials, and proportions.
The paper is shattered, soaked, pressed, and transformed into pulp, then reshaped. The fibers spontaneously aggregate, yet their fragility causes them to break, detach, and recombine during the manual process, generating ever-new forms.
This cycle of destruction and regeneration runs through the entire creative process, becoming an essential part of my visual language.
Q: In “Ravfà’s Body is in Fragments”, the structure seems alive, constantly changing. Do you think of it as complete or always in motion?
A: Ravfà is in constant transformation. With each transportation and installation, its form changes from the previous one: the body falls apart, reassembles, fragments detach and are reattached elsewhere.
It is an organism in perpetual mutation — and it is precisely within this movement that its vitality resides.
Q: Collaboration and tension play a role in “Habitat”. What stays with you from working through that kind of conflict?
A: This work was born from a collective process — through collaboration with other creatives, where paper was manipulated and interwoven, while color became a tool to affirm and redefine an aesthetic position. In truth, at the core of everything there was a sense of guilt, a latent tension. That suspended conflict never found a true equilibrium.
Within that contradiction, I exercised an absolute power: I opened a breach and overturned the work.
Thus, the piece transformed into the trace of a gesture and the outcome of a contingency. In the end, the struggle returned to nothingness.
Q: When you look at your materials — glue, iron, pigment, paper — what kind of life do they seem to have to you?
A: Glue is like a vital fluid, iron and metals are the skeleton, paper is the flesh, and pigment captures the traces of vital movement. When these elements merge, they generate a hybrid form of life — on the threshold between the organic and the industrial — fragile, chaotic, yet stubbornly alive, growing through a continuous alternation of life and death.
