YveYANG is pleased to announce its inaugural participation in Art Basel Hong Kong, where it will present Huidi Xiang’s enchanting project titled i made it.. The solo exhibition promises to captivate audiences with its whimsical yet profound exploration of the complexities surrounding hygiene and labor. Art Basel Hong Kong will take place at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC) from March 28 to 30, 2024, with Preview Days on March 26 and 27.

i made it. brings to life a magical scene of post-cleanup. Several physical sparkles made out of 3D-printed aluminum alloy are scattered around the booth, bringing the virtual special effect of cleanliness from the cartoon into the real world. One motorized sculpture hanging in the middle of the booth and five wood engravings on the walls show a montage of cleaning scenes from cartoon animations. When viewed together, these works present a vibrant choir of busy clean-ups, with popping sparkles. A curved wooden broom, inspired by the magic broom in Disney’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” exhaustedly sits in the corner, its bucket fallen aside. This broken broom is overwhelmed by post-cleaning burnout. The artist Huidi Xiang mixes the imagined and the real through a humorous yet melancholy language, contemplating the complicated relationship between the satisfaction and anxiety associated with personal sanitation, as well as the critical issues related to the labor of cleaning in the private and the public domains.

Huidi’s work often takes the form of sculptural objects, installations, and systems that convolute given pop cultural phenomena and their physical byproducts. She remixes, recontextualizes, and transforms symbols and scenarios of popular media mined from personal and collective experience to construct alternative forms and commentary on late capitalism. With her work, she closely observes, records, transcribes, and translates the landscapes of contemporary society. Through reinterpretation and recreation, she aims to divulge the often brutal making processes, interrogate the hidden power structure, and reflect the intricacy of our made and lived- in surroundings. With a cute yet cruel sculptural gesture, her work usually ruptures the singular storytelling, revealing the contradiction and absurdity inherent in the making of ideology. In her recent research, Huidi unpacks and convolutes the representations of toys, tools, and weapons from video games and popular culture to investigate the complicated relationship between desire and violence, the blurry boundaries between play and labor, and the renewed labor structure.