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

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 a small 3D printer 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.” In the newer version, she removed “sculptor” entirely, leaving the title blank: open to interpretation and to whatever remarks a receiver might bring to it.

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 fantastical and animated world; last time we met, I couldn’t help but notice the 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 the seesaw, and later shifted her attention to model toy trains. 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. For women and other marginalized groups, joking can become a coping mechanism—a way to convey a message without creating additional burden or trouble. I see it as a very particular way of dealing with things for East Asian women.”

Labor is another key word that runs through Xiang’s exercises—“exercises,” as she likes to call her artistic practice, as she once mentioned in an earlier interview. Cinderella 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 all these labors carry exhaustion and cost, just as they do for us 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.

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 silver tears. It is a double-layered fairytale materialized by Xiang, threaded together through the iconic tomato as its central motif. Symbolizing violence, pain, and hurt, the needles also appeared in her re-interpretation of Cinderella at YveYANG Gallery earlier this year. 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.

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 made 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.”

“My work is fundamentally about labor, and as an artist, I also face issues of labor and exploitation.”

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 do wood carving.’ So I turned to digital fabrication—because now I have a machine, and I don’t need muscle anymore. But once I actually began working with digital fabrication, I realized that this space isn’t gender-equal either. Technology, in many of its contemporary contexts, is still largely dominated by men. Take 3D printing, for instance—most people working in that field are men. Even when I call a 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.” Although she repeatedly emphasized that her observations are still fragmented and not yet sufficient to form a comprehensive reflection, I was left with the impression that whether or not she bears the title of “artist,” Xiang is above all a meticulous observer and an ardent thinker who reads everyday life as a container of social forces and phenomena.

The poet W. H. Auden once summarized the relationship human beings have with the fantastical worlds they create: “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 always inseparable. Like a double-yolked egg or two concentric circles, she creates a metaphorical, fabled world within her reality, and confronts her own reality with what she carries back from the fictional one.