This post is also available in:
English
By Emily Verla Bovino
Dehydrated rabbit ears are Dubai chocolate for dogs. A TikTok fetish. Pistachio prices rise after posts on the Emirati trend, and rabbit-ear dog treats flood the “For You” feeds of dog lovers, to the rabbit-meat industry’s delight. Then along come the debunkers. Rabbit fur is not a natural dewormer. Siberian foxes eat rabbits and have plenty of worms. But the proverbial rabbit hole just leads into “dead-dog” TikTok, given how the platform’s algorithm works. After watching some dog content, a user may fall into what one writer calls a “viral-grief loop,” watching video after video of dog euthanasia posted by distressed “pet parents.” The aesthetics of gurokawa (creepy-cute) pervade this mix of industry manipulation, algorithmic happenstance, and cosmic vacuity. London-based, Guangzhou-born artist Yasmine Anlan Huang captures it in objects, videos, performances, and poetry.
“Do you know how the imagination of disaster sprouts together with desire?” Huang ponders. In a sense, the prompt follows scholar Anne Anlin Cheng’s challenge to fetishization as the dominant paradigm for understanding racialized femininity: “What about bodies not undone by objectness but enduring as objects?” In these bodies, Cheng insists, “ornament becomes—is—flesh.” In Huang’s work, it is as if Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno’s Annlee of No Ghost Just a Shell (1999–2002) is incarnated in another TikTok trend, “dissociation feminism,” a 2019 theorization by writer Emmeline Clein Huang. Why purchase a stock character when you can dissociate and make yourself one?
“Cute” in Cantonese is dak yi,which can also mean “peculiar.” Huang’s query about desiring disaster appears as documentation of The Little Eternity That Hovers Above Me (2023), an installation she developed at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, then exhibited later that year at Seoul National University. In the piece, revolting adorability partners well with the necrotically erotic, once perky, then floppy, now freeze-dried flesh of rabbit-ear treats: they are fixed with wire to the feet of a classroom desk balanced upside down on an upturned chair. It is Ilya Kabakov meets Yoshikazu Takeuchi.
The treats are “like flames of a candle,” Huang told me in a recent virtual studio visit. Her art is replete with metaphorical reversals. When four years ago, Beijing art-world mavens warned her against the career dangers of “girl art,” aka “hormone art,” she was alarmed. She tried to repress the girl who failed to be a girl idol—the protagonist of Her Love is a Bleeding Tank (2020), her video-poem selected for the 2024 Whitney Biennial. In this single shot on Huang’s left eye, the camera captures a glint in her sclera melting into a tiny girl who dances into her pupil. This ghost is both a brightness of the eye and a screenreflection onto it. Suppressing the idol summons its rebellion.
The idol submits to its fans so as to subjugate them. In Huang ’ s performance Illogical Innocence (2019), she plays a former idol on Tinder. In transcripts of chats that she shares, Huang is between Hong Kong and New York, describing herself as a “Chinese ” who “ graduated” from a Japanese idol group. In the video Genesis (2020), she performs detaching the girl from this idol-avatar. In the “failed love story ” of Servitude: Do Not Believe That Google Map (2021), the girl recounts a case of literal disorientation turned deadly. Over pulsating static, Chinese and English subtitles tell of a lover lost following satellite maps in post-socialist Siberia. In I’ ve Always Been Practicing the Loss (2023), the idol reanimates in a voice that contemplates the tooth fairy boxes and used condom collections over a snowstorm
Chris Kraus would call it “lonely girl phenomenology. ” She likewise turned “failure ” into “ parasitical resistance. ” In Huang ’ s case, it is a girl hauntology, and the parasite is its own host. In her book Love of the Colonizer (2022), relationship politics mirror the tensions between mainland Guangzhou and postcolonial Hong Kong: “The password to my future unfolds / like the end of a battle / while my tyranny remains / as a snapshot in your album. ” In its emotional bias, intended to
confuse, Huang ’ s poem humorously engenders the “ soft resistance ” that the Hong Kong government warns against, but in romantic terms. Her forthcoming book Becoming Everyone Everywhere (2025) satirizes engulfment.
The “romanticization of trauma” is how Huang characterizes it. She prefers “nomadic” to “diasporic” because, not violently displaced, she’s just nagged by shame that she writes into a character who plays at being “girl,” “Chinese,” and “Asian.” “Yasmine” lives her experiences; “Siming” explores how she might have liked to live but didn’t. In these inter-media forays, it is evident that Huang is of that last generation to study in the milieu of Linda Lai and Leung Chi Wo at the School of Creative Media of the City University of Hong Kong before their retirement. In 2021, she collaborated with Virtue Village, the artist duo of Cas Wong and Joseph Chen, the latter another SCM graduate. In Glory Hole, the duo’s exhibition in a rented van in Kowloon’s gentrifying Sham Shui Po neighborhood, Huang shared Your Earnest Fondle (2021), 672 photographs of her hands. This simulated “handshaking event” offered a titillating touch that never really touches, by an auto-fictional character who failed to be a girl idol because she didn’t have soft hands.
Huang describes herself as “almost self-diagnosed as a hoarder, but it turned out I am just a keen practitioner of morbid dependency.” For every morbid dependency—from the colonizer’s compulsions to the stalker’s intrusions—there is a fetish that, as Cheng defines it, is a“vertiginous renegotiation of subjecthood and objecthood.” This manifests in pixelated images of hands, rabbit-ear dog treats, and ambered mosquitoes that engender emotion in Huang’s crisis of differentiation. Behind the fetish is what Cheng calls the “ornamental personhood” of “transnational American racial modernity.” Huang traces it around the world, from Japan to Siberia.
“This is so melodramatic,” Huang’s voice asserts in dear velocity (2024). The self-referential commentary speaks over a screencast made while she edited that same video. Its analysis is decorative provocation, interrupting her childlike voice-over on shots of an actress playing a sullen girl while Huang clicks around the editing interface. The actress stares back over a candelabra’s flames. In 2025, at Magician Space in Beijing, the repressed idol lit phantasmal fires in a corridor specially fabricated to show new iterations of Bad Things Happen, Not Only in Literature (2024). In the assemblages that Huang calls “evidence”—a collection she considers akin to Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul—there are gel-medium trans-fers of bird carcasses on textile that she designed for mass-
produced frames, while her book Becoming Everyone Everywhere is mounted on a metal stand with flame and floral motifs like spearheads. In this little museum of life lived in dissociation, the hormones leveraged to dismiss a femininity of refusal as the histrionics of the uterus are replaced by the exhaustion of an algorithmic daze.
