Shuyao Huang’s solo show explored perception and change

Chinese artist Shuyao Huang’s solo exhibition “Still Becoming” was on view this summer at Art Cake, 214 40th Street in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Curated by Nicolas Berkel, the exhibition brought together six works created between 2024 and 2026. Through stripes, color, repeated forms and carefully controlled compositions, the works reflect a visual language Huang has been developing in recent years. Beneath their apparent order and regularity, Huang is interested not only in what is painted, but in what viewers actually see and how memory and personal experience shape the way they understand and interpret what is before them.

Huang, who is from Jiangsu, China, took a winding path into art. While she was still in elementary school, she attended a technical school program where she encountered art and later won a national gold medal in an art competition. But after the school merged with an experimental elementary school because of operating problems, that early connection to art was interrupted.

After coming to the United States, Huang initially studied fashion design before teachers encouraged her to turn toward fine art.

“When two teachers see your potential and both tell you the same thing, you seriously start thinking about whether you should change your major,” Huang said.

She eventually transferred to Pratt Institute, where she received structured art training for the first time and earned a bachelor’s degree in painting and fine arts.

“During my studies, I was exposed to foundational training such as color theory and still-life drawing, and I gradually moved from figurative art toward more conceptual and abstract work,” she said.

Today, color and stripes are among the most distinctive elements of Huang’s work. She has long used stripes as a structure in her paintings, but for her they are not simply a repeated visual symbol. They are a framework that can keep changing. Small shifts in proportion, spacing, color and brushwork can alter the viewer’s experience of the image. This idea of variation within repetition is one of the central concepts of “Still Becoming.”

The exhibition was organized into three interrelated parts: “Breath,” “Interruption” and “Becoming.” Rather than functioning as separate series, the three parts unfolded as a process, guiding viewers from regularity and rhythm into instability and then toward a new order shaped by change.

Artist Shuyao Huang, right, with curator Nicolas Berkel at “Still Becoming.” Photo by Jie E.

Huang and Berkel chose the title “Still Becoming” together. It suggests that things remain in a constant state of formation and change, echoing ideas of growth and cycles of life. For Huang, repetition does not mean returning to the same starting point; each repetition produces new differences.

That thinking is also connected to the influence of Buddhist philosophy on Huang. She is particularly interested in impermanence (anicca), emptiness (śūnyatā) and dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), along with meditation, observation and mindfulness. These ideas do not appear in the work through Buddhist symbols or figurative imagery. Instead, they shape how she thinks about repetition, change and the experience of looking.

During the exhibition, Huang said she again experienced how abstract art can spark personal interpretations through seemingly limitless imagination.

“In the same work, some people have told me they saw a garden, while others saw a bedsheet or a pillow,” Huang said.

Huang said viewers’ past experiences influence how they see a work, leading to different intuitions. What makes the process especially interesting, she said, is that those impressions do not remain fixed.

“As time passes and life experience continues to accumulate, when viewers look back at the same work, they often have different feelings and interpretations,” Huang said.

This phenomenon also echoes the exhibition’s title. Whether it is the artwork, the viewer’s perception or the meaning a viewer takes from the work, everything remains in a process of becoming and change, without a single fixed answer.

Readers can view installation images of “Still Becoming” in a review published by Two Coats of Paint.