Huidi Xiang — :iidrrmag1

A Carrier Bag of Play, Creation, and Labor. A Studio Visit with Huidi Xiang

Interview and Writing: Jiani Wang

Editing: Jiani Wang, Yiwei Lu

I met Huidi Xiang on a weekday morning at her studio in Bushwick. Just a few steps from the building where her studio is located, there was a warehouse-like red brick building with a billboard that read “BEIJING FOOD PRODUCTS”(北京食品公司). That billboard later became my wayfinding sign for that area.

Entering Xiang’s studio felt like stepping into a toy-and-craft workshop. Individual sections of train tracks and Mickey Mouse’s hands were stacked in the grids of organizer boxes. Pieces that looked like the feet of an anime character rested against the wall by the entrance. Various tools and two small 3D printers crowded the walls and corners of the room. Graduated from the architecture program at Rice University, Xiang didn’t choose to become an architect, but a sculptor, as she used to put it on her name card. The design of her card was inspired by the classic Warner Bros. character Wile E. Coyote, whose business card famously reads: “Wile E. Coyote. Genius. Have brain. Will travel.” In parallel, Huidi’s card read: “Huidi Xiang. Sculptor. Have brain. Will sing and dance.”

Animation, cartoons, toys, and video games have always been an inseparable part of Xiang’s world, both artistic and personal. She stays attuned to the newest trends in the fantastical and animated world; last time we met, I couldn’t help but notice the Pop Mart crying baby figures hanging from her bag. It’s a realm that feels instinctive and intimate to her, as if she belongs to it as much as it belongs to her.

Cinderella, Mickey Mouse, Kirby, model toys, campaign games created by gigantic online shopping platforms—they have long been sources of inspiration across Xiang’s various series and exhibitions, and, as she puts it, her “most loyal companions in the studio.” For a period of time, Xiang became fascinated by the motif of model toy trains, and later shifted her attention to seesaws, and it was during this period that she began to articulate, in her distinctive visual language, the inseparable relationship between labor and play. As she told me, playfulness is an inherent part of her work and an important message she wants to convey to her viewers:

“It's almost like telling a joke, but the jokes are never meant to be lighthearted. Joking can become a coping mechanism—a way to convey a message without creating additional burden or trouble in the room. I see it as a very particular labor of reading air for women and other marginalized groups.”

Labor is another key word that runs through Xiang’s exercises—“exercises,” as she likes to call her artistic practice. Cinderella and her animal friends must labor over sewing her gown in order to make it to the ball, where she meets the prince who will “change her life” in the original story. Kirby, too, must stay constantly alert, ready to confront new enemies and fuel itself with Maxim Tomatoes to remain energetic and healthy.
And even in fairytales, all labor carries exhaustion and cost, just as it does in the real world. It is this weariness and tension beneath the seemingly playful surface that becomes Xiang’s creative anchor. And as a female artist, she naturally approaches the subject from a gendered perspective, and is willing to recognize and acknowledge this inherent sensitivity of her own position.

Huidi Xiang, there is nothing to it, really, 2024, wood, 3D-printed resin, 5 3/5 × 17 × 2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and YveYANG.

Installation view of Huidi Xiang, my playbench in the workground, 2021. Miller ICA, Pittsburgh, PA. Courtesy of the artist.

Huidi Xiang, maxim tomato: a comforting embrace, 2025, stainless steel, pink onyx, resin, 19 x 12 3/8 x 8 5/8 inches. Photo by Nando Alvarez-Perez. Courtesy of the artist.

In her exhibition “the maxim of the tomato”, on view from April to June 2025 at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Xiang created a “palace of wounded tomatoes,” where black-painted tomatoes punctured with needles lay on the ground or hung on the walls, resembling the tomato-shaped pincushions popular in American domestic spaces. Inside some of the split-open tomatoes, one could find small Kirbys, perpetual pursuers of Maxim Tomatoes, shedding white resin tears. It is a double-layered fairytale materialized by Xiang, threaded together through the iconic tomato as its central motif.

Needles, symbolizing both instruments of domestic care and sites of violence and pain, also appeared in her reinterpretation of Cinderella, shown earlier this year at YveYANG Gallery. In her solo show “goes around in circles, til very, very dizzy”, Xiang extended this imagination into partly sculpture and installation, and partly scenography, deconstructing icons and imagery from the original fairy tale and arranging them alongside her own reflections on the possible messages this classic might carry for contemporary readers. A huge silver needle occupied the central space in the air. The stitch marks that symbolized the physical labor embedded in the plot of friendship and merriment were magnified to call for greater attention. The main character, Cinderella, was deliberately absent, reducing the story’s particularity and leaving room for the invisible forces that hold the scenario together.

Installation view of Huidi Xiang, goes around in circles, til very, very dizzy, 2025. YveYANG, New York, NY. Courtesy of the artist and YveYANG.

We naturally touched upon the manufacturing process of her sculptures, and Xiang shared with me a series of seemingly trivial but revealing experiences she has faced over the past year; stories about fabrication and the power dynamics she has since observed:

“I only started working with fabricators last year. Before that, I did all my work myself. But as far as I know, in contemporary art, especially sculpture, it’s now quite rare for artists to handcraft everything on their own. Often, even the materials we use have already gone through a third-party process. My work is fundamentally about labor, and as an artist, I also face issues of labor and exploitation. When I hire fabricators, a new layer of power dynamics emerges—one that I’m increasingly aware of and constantly thinking through.”

She went on to describe her encounters with male fabricators and technicians in workshops: “I gravitated toward digital fabrication partly because, on a subconscious level, I felt it compensated for certain physical limitations that come with being a woman. When I used to make sculptures, more than once a man would tell me, ‘You don’t have the muscle strength, so you can’t even move the materials you want to sculpt.’ So I turned to digital fabrication—because now I have a machine, and I don’t need muscle anymore. But then I realized that this space isn’t gender-equal either. Technology, in many of its contemporary contexts, is still largely dominated by men.” She took her experience interacting with 3D printing workshops in China as an example: “When I call a 3D printing workshop, the person answering the phone is often a woman, but the ones who actually operate the machines are men. It made me realize that they know they need a female ‘front face,’ while the technical work remains in male hands.”

Huidi Xiang, maxim tomato: work-life balance, 2025, stainless steel, 11 3/4 x 11 1/2 x 15 inches. Photo by Nando Alvarez-Perez. Courtesy of the artist.

Although she repeatedly emphasized that her thoughts remain fragmented and not yet sufficient to form a comprehensive reflection, I was left with the impression that, beyond her more familiar roles as an artist and sculptor, Xiang is foremost a meticulous observer and an ardent thinker, reading everyday life as a container of social forces, phenomena, and life philosophy. Perhaps this is part of the reason why Xiang found herself returning to hand-making again this summer, not yet entirely seriously, but as a way of re-uniting with her hands and with craftsmanship itself. She told me she had taken a stone-carving class and was carving a green Kirby, and that process has become a meditative experience for her.

“I felt reconnected with sculpting itself,” she said. “Unlike my previous method of object-making, which often involved a continual accumulation of elements towards a finished form, stone carving is a practice of reduction, of doing minus. It employs a different kind of logic.” She also rediscovered her conviction that her goal as a sculptor is to make convincing sculptures. “That will make me very happy.”

The fantastical in Xiang’s work initially drew me into the world she crafts. W. H. Auden once summarized the relationship human beings have with the fantastical worlds: “Every normal human being is interested in two kinds of worlds: the primary, everyday world which he knows through his senses, and a secondary world or worlds which he not only can create in his imagination but also cannot stop himself from creating.… Stories about the primary world may be called feigned histories; stories about a secondary world, myths or fairy tales.”

For Xiang, the primary and secondary world are never fully separable. They fold into one another, like a double-yolked egg or two concentric circles. Xiang creates a metaphorical, fabled world within her lived reality, and from it she carries something back, something that can be used to confront and reconfigure the real.

At the end of my visit, Xiang handed me a tiny pocket book that has long been one of her all-time favorites: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. The essay proposes an alternative origin story for both human culture and narrative—one that “avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic” and instead imagines storytelling as a carrier bag “full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations,” a “bag of stars.” It is perhaps the closest version of the world Xiang strives to create in her “exercises.” She labors to create, and she creates as a way of playing.

Huidi Xiang, maxim tomato: a good cry, 2025, stainless steel, pink onyx, resin, 11 3/4 x 11 1/2 x 15 inches. Photo by Nando Alvarez-Perez. Courtesy of the artist.