Jen Chen-Su Huang | 黃謙恕
Jen Chen-su Huang 黃謙恕 is an artist and writer whose process-driven works interweave elements of craft tradition, language, history, and memoir. Her practice has been supported by fellowships through the Fulbright Commission in Taiwan, Luminarts, and the Textile Society of America, among others. She received her M.F.A. in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently an editor for the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles and a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at NYU Tisch.
I approach art-making as a daily practice. My works begin as sentimental stockpiles reecting what I intuitively attend to in everyday life – they become palimpsest love letters to an always shifting sense of home, to all the places I have lived and loved. These multi-sensory and often textile-based assemblages bring together an array of geographies and temporalities, honoring the memories spent in California, Chicago, Taipei, Tainan, and New York. Just as the dierent materials featured in these quilts, such as indigo-dyed cotton and linen lace, come with their complicated histories and often colonial legacies, I am interested in how a life emerges from this backdrop of chance socio-political and ecological events. These entanglements are mirrored in my collages and include references from personal and historical accounts.