Taiwanese artist Steph Huang’s 'Grafting' installation debuts at Art Basel Hong Kong

台灣藝術家黃麗音（Steph Huang）的裝置作品《嫁接》在香港巴塞爾藝術展上首次亮相

HONG KONG (Taiwan News) — At Art Basel Hong Kong, the monumental installation “Grafting,” presented by gallery Perrotin in the Encounters sector, has emerged as a focal point of the fair.

Taiwanese artist Steph Huang (黃麗音) intertwines private memories with collective history, transforming the complex discourse of identity into a nostalgic, poetic space.

Unlike the overt political critiques often found in contemporary art addressing colonial history, Huang employs a precise visual restraint in Grafting.

The artist uses a palette of soft pastel greens and cherry-blossom pinks to cultivate a domestic atmosphere evocative of Taiwan. This choice of color balances the installation's massive scale, wrapping the intricate process of cultural interlacing in the soft textures of childhood nostalgia.

Grafting is a botanical term for joining two different plants to grow as one. Huang uses it as a metaphor for the evolution of Taiwanese culture.

Centering the narrative on a character named "Susan," she uses the mango to trace a specific history: from the native varieties brought by the Dutch in the 17th century to Indian cultivars introduced during the Japanese colonial period, and later the Irwin and Keitt varieties imported from Florida in the 1960s.

The recombination of these diverse varieties on Taiwanese soil produced the flavors familiar to the public today. For Huang, culture is like these mangoes — a vessel woven from different points in time and multiple cultural layers.

A secondary focus of the installation is a series of shoji doors. These are authentic objects salvaged from the homes of Huang's elders and friends, carrying the physical traces of traditional Taiwanese architecture.

Huang said that after these Japanese-style doors were introduced to Taiwan, their fragile paper surfaces were often replaced with plastic to withstand the island's humidity.

In this work, Huang utilized her glassmaking skills to embed textured stained glass into the door frames. Under the play of light, the glass mimics the fragility of paper. As viewers pass by, the blurred visual effect symbolizes the vulnerability of memory and culture over time.

The work incorporates motion sensors that trigger lights as visitors walk through, a gesture meant to represent the activation of sealed stories. Bubble-like glass forms suspended between the doors represent the weight of memory.

Huang describes memory as an unspeakable, ethereal form — much like air bubbles — carrying fragmented moments of childhood, such as playing on tatami mats or resting under a mango tree.

Through Grafting, Huang elevates Taiwan’s domestic and territorial elements to an international stage. Amidst warm pink hues and translucent glass, she guides viewers from personal memory toward an understanding of a cultural landscape grafted by time.