KATINKA HUANG
Katinka Huang (b. 1998, Shanghai, China) grew up between Shanghai and London, her practice shaped by the contradictions of two cultures. Her abrupt move to England and subsequent experiences at an all-girls school prompted her to explore the entanglement of identity and womanhood. Elements of the female form are deconstructed and juxtaposed to create subversive, satirical, and often absurd narratives around womanhood. On the canvas, figures are stretched, fragmented, and undone, caught in states of dissociation where the self becomes fluid and unstable. Her paintings draw on the psychological in-between: the moment the mind detaches from its surroundings and enters a space of play, grief, and reinvention. Elements of self-portraiture collapse into imagined narratives, producing bodies that are simultaneously familiar and unrecognisable. By embracing ambiguity and instability, Katinka explores the impossibility of capturing identity without deforming it.
ARTIST STATEMENT for Stage Fright
In this exhibition, I delve into the multiplicity of the self, a subject long central to psychoanalysis and myth alike. As Freud explored in his writing on the uncanny, and Otto Rank in his study of the double, the figure who most resembles us can also be the one who unsettles us most, familiar and foreign at once. My work grapples with this duality, treating identity not as something fixed but as a cast of characters in continual negotiation with itself. Bodies double and multiply across the canvas; a face returns, distorted, on the screen of an old television; braided hair recurs from painting to painting as the one constant in a self that otherwise refuses to hold still. Rendered in the saturated reds and sickly greens of a dreamscape, these figures watch, crawl, and perform for one another, like actors in a private theater.
GALLERY EXHIBITIONS
KATINKA HUANG:
Stage Fright
November 6 - December 20, 2026
