From what angle should we look at the dangers faced by women in society? How do artists feel when they participate in crime investigations? How do they translate their personal feelings into shareable empathetic experiences? Sherry Huang’s Last Seen evokes violence, trauma, and a sense of danger. In terms of subject matter and its handling, this series of photographs differs from an earlier series entitled Love Remains, which delves into selfhood, interiority, intimacy, and the practice of journal keeping. In her new work, Huang goes beyond herself to explore other people’s experiences, focusing on the violence experienced by women in society at large, as well as in the privacy of intimate relationships. Last Seen and Love Remains seem to be drastically different in form and methodology, but they are both concerned with close relationships, dangerous conflicts, death and regeneration, and the female body.
Huang’s solo exhibition After the Last Shadow—mounted in Taipei City’s AKI Gallery in February 2021—expands on the themes of violence, trauma, and pain in Last Seen, using a dialectic method to open up the possibility of healing. Inside the brightly lit “white cube” on the first floor of the gallery, there are three CCTV monitors stacked on top of each other, showing flickering, blurry images of women. On the walls hang two large black-and-white photographs that have been visibly smeared. Ascending to the second floor, we are engulfed by a dark and strange sense of space. Scattered on the floor are several CCTV monitors, again displaying fuzzy figures of women. The electric cables of the monitors are exposed, hanging here and there across the space. Again, we see large-scale photographs that bear clear signs of damage, but here they are interspersed with smaller, irregularly spaced pictures. Finally, the third floor offers fewer visual symbols, and in this dark space we are invited only to listen to certain sounds and to peruse a small number of documents.