Steph Huang's solo show There is nothing old under the sun at esea contemporary is reviewed by Dr. Vivien Chan.
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?
Learn more --
Steph Huang: There is nothing old under the sun — Corridor8
