Katinka Huang

Katinka Huang - "Studies".

Artist Biography: Katinka moved to England from China at a young age - not with her family - but on her own. Katinka attended an all girls boarding school whose Western ideology about gender and propriety conflicted with the eastern ideology of femininity that she was brought up with in China. Katinka's upbringing at a boarding school dominated by girls ignited her interest in examining the female psyche. In response to the artist's state of confusion and alienation, she created alter-egos as a coping mechanism. Katinka uses these alter-egos in her art practice to create satirical images of women with warped, and animalistic bodies that portray absurdism and turbulent emotional states. The figures in Katinka's work celebrate the enigma of female psychology, confronting the historical definition within the West of an hysterical woman as "untamed," "fearful " , "neurotic" and most importantly, "with strong sexual desire." This stereotype persists to this very day and is a common characterisation of women as 'too emotional, too intense or too sensitive. In the 19th century, French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot showcased 'hysterical' women as objects of public spectacle after psychologically provoking them, before taking credit for uncovering the 'root' of women's trauma. Drawing from these accounts of history Katinka interlaces them with contemporary women whose 'hysterical' behaviours are sensationalised by the world. Katinka's mixed media figurative paintings uncover a mutilated female psyche by dissecting the genesis of her own trauma as a woman. Katinka uses painting as a personal diary. In the work, people and places the artist encounter in her everyday life are represented as monstrous or saccharine creatures, and as antagonists and protagonists.

 

KATINKA HUANG (Shanghai, China, b. 1998) is a painter based in New York City. Katinka Huang's work reveals her fascination with the enigma of the female psyche. Her pictorial language questions our perception through deconstructed, deliquescent and juxtaposed forms with which the artist constructs new narratives around the concept of femininity. Katinka Huang conceives the canvas as a liminal space for the genesis of identity: the bloody, childlike innocence, fury and eroticism are conjugated in the bodies formulated by the artist, which stand as powerful allegorical forms of vindication. The construction of this imaginary -full of self-referential characters-, is based on an introspective dialogue, an intimate story that originates in moments of dissociation, in which Huang distances herself from reality and enters a space of play, which allows her to reimagine femininity in all its contradictions.