Jennifer Chen-su Huang
Jennifer Chen-su Huang is an artist and writer whose process-driven works interweave elements of craft tradition, language, history, and memoir. She is a 2021 Luminarts Fellow and an artist-in-residence at Chicago Artists Coalition's HATCH program. In 2017-2018, Jennifer completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Taiwan, where she was a Research Fellow with the Ethnology Department at National Chengchi University, as well as a Visiting Artist at Tainan National University of the Arts. She graduated with her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley. Huang has exhibited her artwork internationally at Haiton Art Center in Taipei and across the United States at Untitled Prints and Editions in Los Angeles, Kearny St. Workshop in San Francisco, and Gallery 400 in Chicago, among others. She is currently an editor for the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles to be published in 2024.
Title of Project
WAVE + E: Looping Events, S(tr)ung through Prayer
Description of Project
Rather than dwell on the wave-particle duality paradox in order to describe a physical phenomena as a wave or particle (or something else), I’d like to suggest forgoing this desire caught between nouns to propose the study of a verb. What happens when one adds another ‘e’ to wave – can we interchange wave for weave?
While weaving on a backstrap loom, I meditate on loops – the twinkling audio loop of ice cream trucks and trash trucks emitting the chorus of Tekla Badarzewska’s The Maiden’s Prayer, as well as the loop of the cloth as it begins to emerge around the wooden box, which becomes an extension of my body. As I weave I wonder what waves resonate from the loom.
I attend to the waves effused by trash trucks in Taiwan and ice cream trucks in Chicago in an attempt to describe the relationships between natural phenomena and vibrant matter. By thinking alongside Karen Barad, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Jane Bennett, among others, I hope to bring attention to everyday “intra-actions,” in order to begin to dissolve long-held subject-object dichotomies.
Using pre-recorded audio and a microphone hooked up to my loom, I will weave for the full duration of the presentation. By weaving on the indigenous Taiwanese backstrap loom, I intend to demonstrate the cyclical movement of weaving that produces cloth in a loop. The loom is not only an instrument to produce fabric, but it was said that Atayal and Seediq women would beat down upon the woven ramie so that the box with which the warp threads wrap around resonates. Not only does this create a tighter weave and a strong textile, but this gesture ensures that the neighbors would hear them weaving, thereby connecting the community through sound.
In this experimental intra-play between weaves and waves, I hope to offer phenomenological descriptions (as well as multi-sensorial experiences) of my observations that others might be able to enter and admire the ordinary rituals they too partake in. Through the motion of weaving, I consider the entanglements among what has been privileged as bodies, mind, and matter.
Project Inspiration
“Let me consider a possibility: What if, instead of The Ordered World, we could image The World as Plenum, an infinite composition in which each existent’s singularity is contingent upon its becoming one possible expression of all other existants, with which it is entangled beyond space and time." - Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference without Separability”
Areas of Academic Interest
Textile/Craft Theory, Art/Design History, Indigenous Studies, Affect Theory