The air is humid after another night of October rain; I’ve stepped in a few puddles on the way to esea contemporary from Manchester Piccadilly, and my face and body feel the clamour of another British autumn. It’s a fitting sensory undertone for Taiwanese artist Steph Huang’s exhibition, There is nothing old under the sun. This exhibition, Huang’s first solo show in Manchester, extends with her fascination with the sea and seafood, previously seen in her publications Prawns and Pigs (2019) and A Great Increase in Business is on Its Way (2022); and her current film installation at Tate Britain See, See, Sea (2024). Huang draws on her interest in food production and consumption (shellfish, in particular) in relation to city spaces such as markets, to produce playful sculptures and assemblages, employing techniques in printmaking, glassblowing, woodwork and metalwork, as well as using found objects and sound. Indeed the space is like an aquarium from the outside looking in, with large glass windows looking over Thomas Street. esea contemporary is housed in the offices of the Former Wholesale Fish Market, added as an extension to the Smithfield Market in 1872, a fitting home for Huang’s latest ocean explorations.
The title is an homage to Italian artist and photographer Luigi Ghirri, who, in his essays on photography, reverses the Ecclesiastes quote, ‘there is nothing new under the sun.’ Ghirri posits instead that nothing is in fact old, through ‘the wonder of gesture, the slight change of light, the possibility of a new perception.’ In combination with her fascination with the sea and the city, Huang invites us to look again with watery eyes and a whetted appetite – how might the ocean and its invertebrate occupants help to shed new light on how we understand and navigate the city? What happens if we look at the city like it’s underwater, or as what Gaston Bachelard describes in The Poetics of Space, a book that has inspired Huang’s approach to space, a city-ocean? What if we imagined a building as a shell, what kind of creature would make it home?
As a design historian with a focus on markets in Hong Kong, this affinity for the market and seafood is familiar to me. Something in Huang’s research process (‘field trips are essential’) speaks to my own, wandering a city’s market spaces, perusing the ingredients on offer, experiencing the space from one place to another to learn its stories. Visiting the gallery is not so different from such a market visit. On arrival into the Communal Project Space next to the gallery entrance, we are met with a small object, like a market stall in miniature. The object is about the size of a shoebox raised on three steel spheres, placed on a lilac plinth. The wooden sides are painted mint with the walls of the short side die-cut into geometric windows, with a strange walnut-sized rock attached to one window, and the roof of the box is made of a translucent black glass. The piece is called Drizzle Between Bricks (2024), an assemblage which literally mirrors the drizzly weather outside through the window, developed during her residency at esea contemporary, supported by the University of Salford’s Maker Space. Commissioned by esea contemporary and the University of Salford Art Collection, the tiny structure is inspired by the landscape of Greater Manchester, a mixture of Victorian styles and modern/postmodern glass facades, but perhaps also the respective architectural influences in Asia. Its geometric windows remind me of the open bricks for ventilation in Hong Kong and Singapore, but the image of mushrooms hidden under the glassy reflections of its roof are a humorous suggestion of the damp, temperate landscapes contained within.
Humour and humidity continue through the Communal Project Space. On the windowsill is an opened tin can from which a handful of clay King Prawns peek out in SiaSia (2024), packaged in its own fictional branding. Bamboo leaves weave in and out of a pair of narrow shutters, a bilingual play on Hundred Leaves a Blind (2024), an inside joke between her and other Mandarin-English speakers alluding to the Chinese name for shutters common in European homes. Steel lines, meandering metal poles flourished with an array of bronze shells attached to the walls, draw waves (suggesting sound, or movement) through the space, suggesting a Situationist dérive (a 1960s practice rooted in Paris, which aims to navigate the city spontaneously and unpredictably, another of Huang’s inspirations) through her narration. Elongated glass drops swing gently as I pass by, reminiscent of icicles, cartoonish snotty noses, or a sweet syrupy substance. At times, humour lays the groundwork for wonder. Another piece, All of Space and Time and their Contents (2024), reminds its viewers to look up at the moon, here represented in a milky blue slab of glass, simultaneously weightless and slipping out of the steel casing from its heavy centre, the moon might be a gelatinous projection of all the things we might never understand in our lifetime. Perhaps laughter is a portal to the unknown, and in asking childlike questions of the world, the loftiest ideas about all of space and time might become less intimidating.
There is a whiff of melancholy in amongst the more whimsical motifs. Continuing to the Main Gallery, a closed, intimate space at the back of esea contemporary, the exhibition takes on the quality of a different place from the tongue-in-cheek reflection introduced in the Communal Project Space facing the street. The photographs of close-up plants and natural textures printed on glass, metal or perspex which feature in several pieces through the exhibition (one being the show’s namesake There is nothing old under the sun (2024); and others Summer on the Riviera (2024); Wood and Stone (2024); Willow Pond (2024)) are somewhat nostalgic in their depiction, yet do not seem to lead to any specific time or place. Framed in wooden cases painted burgundy or olive green or projected off the walls with steel rods, the frames also feature found shells and pebbles balancing tenuously on their surfaces alongside glass icicles. Other titles suggest real or imagined relationships to times and spaces past, where different sculptures construct narrative vignettes of stories lost. Every Day Seems a Little Longer (2024) constructs a miniature floor plan out of a found tin can and metal racking, wooden surfaces and a bronze-cast stick with a snail shell tip, resembling a ghostly market stall or a kitchen counter after service hours. The Gone Room (2024)and A Regular Arrangement (2024) communicate a sense of longing through their overlapping ovals. Made out of the wooden offcuts of other artworks leaving large oval windows in the wood, A Regular Arrangement features long stems topped with bronze scallop shells formed into tight petals reaching through the oval windows of the structure. Through the absences in A Regular Arrangement, The Gone Room, made from the wallpaper of her parents’ wedding room in Taiwan, cut and pasted onto a piece of wood in the shape of three concentric ovals and hung on the wall, subtly suggests a flattened world map as though that space was a time and world away. Looking through the ovals evokes a romantic sense of the past, perhaps a refraction of Huang’s own diasporic experience, or a refashioning of the past into an imagined arrangement of people and places.
Willow Pond is more direct and banal in how time is preserved in Huang’s narration. A dead moth is placed lightly over the corner of a piece of hand-dyed silk with neon lights glowing beneath, reminiscent of the bug traps attracting mosquitos to their deaths, a glowing azure glass bubble opposing it. The moth, as Assistant Curator Julia Jiang tells me, was an addition for the esea contemporary leg of the exhibition. Arriving in a matchbox alongside the other components of the piece, the moth had been trapped and died inside the lightbox during the display at Standpoint Gallery in London, essentially mummified as part of the sculpture in this iteration. In-built into the ‘old as new’ is a small flutter of grief, of all the lives you might never have known, or as Ghirri puts it, ‘the burden of what already has been lived’.
Remnants of the sea feature as the most prominent thread through each piece. Bronze shells of all kinds (clams, scallops, whelks, snails) litter the exhibition as we beach-comb, and conches are depicted in repeat in the wallpaper piece Screw Shell in Two Dimensions (2024). The Poetics of Space dedicates an entire chapter to shells – home to daydreams and beasts of the grotesque and the beautiful, Huang’s shells suggest the emergence of creatures ‘under the magnifying glass of imagination’, as Bachelard puts it. Shells contain the mysterious, squishy parts of an animal, and, as a house, are the structure in which dreams are forged. As well as the glitter of small clusters at the ends of rods and corners of frames, the shell of a home is implied in other ways. Each and Every One of Us (2024), an installation of two rows of tiles in caramel and teal-coloured glaze, resembles the decorative tiles on the roof of a house, and other sculptures could easily be recognised as furniture in the under-sea abode Huang builds. At the same time, Bubbling Up (2024), a lantern-like steel cage attached to the wall encasing two clear glass ‘bubbles’ on top of each other, and Moon Exploration (2024), a steel circle with the sides gently lifted holding three clear and translucent glass bubbles with a lightbulb within, might be new species of jellyfish or microscopic organisms, contained in half-hardened shells of crystal and steel. The metal cases and dishes present glass as delectable bites that could melt in the mouth, delicacies that can be slurped out of their shells before tossing them aside.
This kind of decadence in Huang’s daydream is encapsulated in an assemblage in the centre of the Main Gallery, I Am in a Pretty Pickle (2024). Refashioning a ten litre ‘Nur Augurken’ pickle-can, two glass-blown pickles are softly hammocked on a bed of silk over the top of the can, and a gentle crunching can be heard echoing from within. The cries of a Parisian market follow this vinegary mastication, maybe in memory of a perfect morsel, or, in lieu of something more refined, a gherkin and a daydream will have to do. The pickle-can as a found object, with its garish red and white packaging, contrasts with the more melancholic sculptures surrounding it, crunching obnoxiously in the dining room as others look on in discomfort. The curiosity and absurdity, in the piece’s awkward smallness in the room, reframes the installation entirely as under the spell of the hidden beast that has made the pickle-can its shell. It’s the same feeling you experience on discovering that what you hear when you put the hollow of a shell to your ear is not, in fact, the waves of the sea but rather your own blood gushing through your body. I Am in a Pretty Pickle admits to luxuriating in and refusing to snap out of a romantic, sensorial view of the world.
As the automatic doors open out into the wet domain outside, little pinpricks of rain tickle my eyes as I make my way through the city, now reconfigured into the city-ocean dreams shared by Ghirri and Huang. If you look hard enough, little treasures lie everywhere: out of the shadows, tiny shells with autonomous creatures emerge out of the cracks of what was once new.
Steph Huang: There is nothing old under the sun, 28 September – 8 December 2024, esea contemporary, Manchester
Dr Vivien Chan is a design historian, educator, writer and imagemaker based in Nottingham.
This review is supported by esea contemporary.
Published 24.10.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
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