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Claude Levi-Strauss divided human thought into two modes: The first is scientific, seeking to ascertain cause and effect based on evidence. The second is the mythical, intuitive mode of “bricolage.” The two produce different correlative relationships between people and the environment. In Shih Chieh Huang’s works, these two modes of thought undergo a magical reversion: He uses mass-produced home electronics and industrial products as creative materials to render a fabulous world of technology. Home appliances seem to have been dismantled and reassembled in a state of emergency, yet the viewer can still discern their original appearance as well as their alteration. Like a deft handyman, Shih Chieh Huang assembles a scientific edition of bricolage. Under Huang’s treatment, these products, like Frankensteinian creatures assembled from lifeless components, begin to have their own organic life and to reproduce themselves.

Shih Chieh Huang often uses simple materials, such as plastic bags, electrical wires, adhesive tape and nylon cable for the infrastructure. Under their multicolored, refulgent exteriors of neon lights gleaming at night, one can see commonplace scenes and cultural habitus from everyday life. In his work TV Bottles, Huang fixed plastic bottles atop a television set, and made them flash with light in the dark, like a scintillating cityscape in the night air. Weird worlds placed in twisted spaces have consistently typified his works: the bizarre Organic  Concept: New York City Panorama, which took over the skyline of miniature city; Mouse Wonderland, a disco for white mice; or extinct giant worms constructed of plastic bags. Huang’s works are like the results of a mad scientist’s experiments, revealing odd connections among technology, nature and the urban environment. Yet his works do not make use of high-tech products; rather, by using low-tech consumer goods, he more ably reflects contemporary life. 

This exhibition features Huang’s work, EVX-07, a technological garden constructed by the seemingly spontaneous and unconstrained assembly of readymade products. The gadgets displayed here are mutually interacting with visitors in their own tiny universe. What Huang is attempting to express is not a technological utopia, but a system of objects alienated from the human. Shih Chieh Huang is a “punk” of tech art, e.g., For example, his Eye Video is a video instruction showing “how to” alter home appliances as an interactive art. He does not attempt to provide a perfect simulacrum through high technology, but instead tends to create short-circuits of technology and thus to note equipmentality in its bare state.

When these objects are set into motion, in the midst of a repetitive and irregular rhythm, there is a kind of obsessive, hysterical psychological state in his installation. As Marx famously contended, “Humanity produces things according to the measure of beauty.” This measurement of beauty produced is the poetic source of the material world present in Shih Chieh Huang’s works.

Hongjohn Lin