Whisperer
Yasmine Anlan Huang
Condo London 2026, Hosting Magician Space, Beijing
17.01.26 - 14.02.26Whisperer
Text by Dot Zhihan Jia
In Whisperer, her debut UK solo exhibition, Yasmine Anlan Huang constructs an archaeology of absence informed by her nomadic grounding in multiple cities. The title carries a dual resonance: a whisperer as one who speaks in hushed, barely audible tones; as well as someone skilled in taming wild animals through body language and voice rather than force.
The exhibition’s centerpiece, a single-channel video installation Together We Confess (2025), functions as a study in displaced proximity. The journey is ostensibly a pilgrimage to the Makedonium, a concrete Spomenik of Yugoslavia’s fractured history. Yet the destination never appears. Instead the film dissolves into the green shimmer of the Black Drin River Springs, tracing a chance encounter on a boat between a Tajik photographer and a young Albanian boatman. By withholding the familiar anchors of identity and history, the work resists the impulse to categorise. Huang fixes the camera on the water’s trembling surface – a plane of reflection rhythmically fractured by the oar’s pull – to produce a meditation on the ethics of attention rather than a portrait of place.
The accompanying wall-based sculpture, A Promise to Forever (2026), acts as a material residue of the unreached destination. Cast in iron and aluminium, the work carries a deconstructed ticket to the Makedonium, providing physical weight to the film’s elusive narrative. Here, the recurring motif of the star serves as a silent coordinate, tracing a shared post-socialist lineage between the regions represented on the boat. This geopolitical gravity is indicated by a collision of registers: the monumental and the Lolita-fashion-coded bow; the iron-hard history of the state and the soft, devotional aesthetics of the self.
In two image-based textile pieces – Which version of my body? (truthseeker) (2026) and Surrogate (peacemaker) (2026) –, Huang archives bodies of birds found on city streets, stilled in the aftermath of flight. Framed in cloth and embroidered with beaded text, these works reach back to a time when the seasonal disappearance of birds was explained through myths of transmutation. By re-clothing the sudden absence of a pigeon in textile and the symbolic weight of embroidered titles, she negotiates the transition from the biological to the monumental. The physical density of the body is traded for the weightlessness of myth, transforming a common street occurrence into an act of collective grieving.
This dialogue with mortality continues in the sculpture Flesh Before Memory (2026). A rabbit trap rests in the gallery like an interrupted sentence – the architecture of a potential ending. If the images of deceased pigeons register disappearing, the trap theorises its manufacture. By adding a lace handkerchief and a Spomenik pin badge into the mechanism’s cast-iron frame, Huang forms a diptych on fragility as a condition shaped by systems, both domestic and ideological. In this, she offers a grim proposition: we mythologise the birds that vanish and aestheticise those we find, yet we continue to manufacture the mechanisms of their disappearance.
The installation Love of the Colonizer (2025) centres on Huang’s eponymous book, a collection of prose and poetry written during the pandemic. Voiced through ‘Siming’ – a speculative alter ego and transliteration of the artist’s name – the book embodies a devotion perpetually shadowed by friction and the weight of othering. The text functions as an emotional chronicle of survival, a monologue where language touches, omits, and suggests. This balance is physically enacted in its presentation: its cover, encrusted with pale pink nacre, catches an iridescent sheen – a material that is itself a defensive secretion. The book is impaled upon a blade, held by the binding that clings to the cold silhouette of the steel. Suspended from ropes that function simultaneously as a lyrical swing and an emergency escape line, the object exists in literal suspension – a manifestation of a devotion that must negotiate its own survival within a dominating gaze.
Huang’s practice is an act of vigilant attention to what hovers unresolved at the edges of understanding. She charts a poetics of the threshold where the desire to see is checked by the opacity of the surface, and the machinery of the trap is softened into an elegy. Whisperer gathers works that linger within the fragile, suspended grammar of translation – a way of inhabiting the gaps of what can never be fully known, and recognising that space as love.
Yasmine Anlan Huang (b.1996, Guangzhou) is an artist and writer migrating between London, New York and Hong Kong. She explores how desires and angst within coming-of-age stories subvert patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist expectations. Her polyphonic narratives evolve from video poetry into sculpture, performance, and public programs, moving between autobiography and autofiction to unfold as modern fables of cultural and ideological tension.
Huang’s solo and two-person shows include Magician Space (Beijing), Goethe-Institut Hong Kong (Hong Kong) among others. Her work has been included in Whitney Biennial 2024 (New York), Peckham 24 (London), HART Haus (Hong Kong), Power Station of Art (Shanghai), and more. She has participated in multiple residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her debut book of poems and essays, Love of the Colonizer, was published by Accent Sisters in 2022.
Huang holds a BA (Hons) in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong, an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Hong Kong, and an MFA from Parsons School of Design.
