Bony Ramirez
Craig Taylor
Dabin Ahn
Drew Dodge
Edd Ravn
Greg Ito
Hein Koh
Ina Jang
Ji Woo Kim
Jin Jeong
KangHee Kim
Miwa Neishi
Reuben Paterson
Sahana Ramakrishnan
Shuyi Cao
Shyama Golden
Sophia Heymans
Su Su
Sung Hwa Kim
Wanki Min
Yoora Lee
Yujie Li
Yuri Yuan
Zayira Ray
3D-printed aluminum alloy, wood, resin, polylactic acid, dimensions variable.
Courtesy of the artist and YveYANG Gallery.
Courtesy of the artist and YveYANG Gallery.
3D-printed resin, 24 5/8 × 53 1/2 × 21 ¾ in.
Courtesy of the artist and YveYANG Gallery.
memory/
My whole practice is deeply influenced by video games and animation, especially American cartoons like Disney, Looney Tunes, and Tom and Jerry. My mom introduced me to these cartoons when I was little. She was also an artist–a traditional Chinese ink painter–and when she was pregnant with me, she painted a mural in our bedroom with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in an ink landscape scene. I always say I met Mickey Mouse before I was born.
This part of my brain was activated when I started making art, particularly while becoming an artist in America. I always say I learned English from these cartoons, even though they don’t have much dialogue. It’s not just about language, it’s also about narration–how to tell a joke and how to do it in an American way.
As I developed my artistic language, those cartoons became a crucial reference, like a vocabulary. Many of my current projects revisit narratives and scenarios from those cartoons, reinterpreting, recontextualizing, and borrowing their unique language. My brain acts like an archive and when I have a question I want to explore, I dig into my archive. If I want to talk about the labor of sewing, I can reference the mouse sewing scene from Cinderella. When I worked on a project about the labor of cleaning, I thought of Mickey Mouse casting a cleaning spell on his broom in Fantasia.
Courtesy of the artist.
line/
My relationship with these references is somewhere in between fan art and fine art. I’m a big fan of the capitalist products that I engage with, but I also approach them critically. I feel it’s impossible to completely disconnect from capitalism or be fully critical of it. We are all part of the system of being abused and abusing others at the same time.I started researching labor, especially immersive labor structures like digital labor, while studying at Carnegie Mellon University. I became obsessed with playing Animal Crossing during the COVID pandemic. Animal Crossing made me think a lot about the relationship between play and labor since the game revolves around physical labor, but you’re just pressing buttons. Nowadays, many games are designed as training tools. On the other hand, workplaces, like the Google headquarters, are designed to be playful, keeping their employees at the office and exploiting their creativity and productivity.
If we frame labor as play, it becomes something uncompensated. Care labor faces the same issue–the loving housewife or friend is idealized, but never compensated. My research has shifted more toward the domain of domestic or private labor, including sewing, cleaning, and caretaking. Women and other marginalized groups often perform this labor in ways that are underappreciated and undervalued.
I worked on a project dedicated to my mom called we’ve decided to grow oranges together (2023). In 2023, my mom and I played an orange-growing video game together on the online shopping platform, Taobao, where you grow a digital tree and receive real oranges when the tree is harvested. To fertilize the tree, you perform digital labor for Taobao by scrolling through ads and training their AI to make better recommendations to customers.
My mom used the game in two ways: first, for free fruit, but also as a system of care. My family lives in China, so her way of checking in with me in the US was by looking at if I fertilized the tree that day. It became a way for us to check on each other, but we were constantly paying a toll fee to the platform by scrolling their ads. The work considers how it’s possible to care for each other physically, digitally, or ethically, even while we’re trapped in these systems. It doesn’t give a direct answer but observes these new labor systems.
Courtesy of the artist and The Bronx Museum.
Image credit: Argenis Apolinario.
color/
My work begins with digital modeling on Rhino or Blender. My studio functions like a lab and I use the 3D printer in my studio to produce mockups and prototypes, which I see as sketches or drawings. I like to think that I’m creating my own readymade objects, taking apart existing products, digesting them, dismantling them, and studying how they work.My process is a constant exchange between handmaking and 3D digital printing. Some elements may look machine-made, but they’re actually handmade, and vice versa. For example, I make “wood frames”, but they’re 3D-printed resin with an overlaid wood pattern. When you make 3D visualizations, you apply texture to a flat block and it turns into wood. I wanted to bring that into the physical world.
When I work with a digital model, it feels like I’m modeling digital clay, but with a computer mouse rather than my hands. It makes me wonder: What does it mean to be handmade? Does it require pure physical labor, or can it involve a mix of the digital and physical? I love playing with this tension because my life and practice involve constant navigation between the digital and physical worlds.
Courtesy of the artist.
Gabrielle Luu is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY and the Editor-in-Chief of Civil Art.
Courtesy of the artist.
Image credit: Zhaoxuan Yang
Huidi Xiang
Huidi Xiang (b. 1995) is a sculptor based in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BA in Architecture from Rice University in 2018 and an MFA in Art from Carnegie Mellon University in 2021.
Huidi’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Bronx Museum of the Arts (Bronx, NY), YveYANG Gallery (New York, NY), KAJE (Brooklyn, NY), Tutu Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Lydian Stater (Long Island City, NY), and Contemporary Calgary (Calgary, Canada). She has presented commissioned works at the Jing’an International Sculpture Project (Shanghai, China, 2024), X Museum Triennial (Beijing, China, 2023), and OCAT Biennale (Shenzhen, China, 2021). Huidi has also participated in numerous artist residencies, including the Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship, Lighthouse Works Fellowship, NARS Foundation International Residency Program, and Millay Arts Residency Program.