Huang Chih-Cheng & Hao
Stalker
September 5-26, 2026
Opening: September 4, 6-8 pm
Fragment is delighted to present "Stalker," the first New York and U.S. solo exhibition by Taiwanese artist duo Huang Chih-Cheng & Hao. Based in Taipei, Huang Chih-Cheng (b. 1988) and Liou Jyun-Hao (b. 1992) have worked collaboratively since 2021.
Cinema occupies a particular place in Huang Chih-Cheng & Hao’s practice — not simply as a source of imagery, but as a way of thinking about looking, duration, memory, and the construction of subjectivity. Their visual vocabulary draws on a broad cinematic lineage, from Federico Fellini and Jean Cocteau to the psychological and observational language of the Taiwanese New Wave. The exhibition’s title, "Stalker," extends this dialogue toward Andrei Tarkovsky’s cult film, which has remained a reference point for generations of artists precisely because it transforms movement through space into a philosophical and perceptual experience. Here, the title becomes less a direct quotation than a proposition: to look is to search, to follow, and to enter a territory whose meaning remains unstable.
The gaze is central to this proposition. Throughout Huang Chih-Cheng & Hao’s work, looking is never neutral. It can become an instrument of desire, institutional authority, social discipline, or historical classification; elsewhere, withholding oneself from view becomes an assertion of agency. Bodies are cropped, restrained, turned away, or stripped of identifying features. Mirrors promise access only to become barriers. Doors remain suspended between opening and closing. Familiar gestures are isolated from their contexts until their meanings become uncertain. The viewer repeatedly encounters a boundary between what is offered to sight and what refuses to be fully disclosed.
This instability reflects a larger question at the center of the duo’s practice: how is a subject constituted within histories and systems that precede it? Responding to Taiwan’s complex and multilayered colonial history and to a cultural landscape repeatedly fractured and reconfigured by successive regimes, Huang Chih-Cheng & Hao approach identity not as something inherited intact, but as something continually assembled, questioned, and renegotiated. Their work asks what remains of cultural identity when history itself has been subject to competing systems of representation, preservation, erasure, and reconstruction.
Their references consequently move across cultural and intellectual traditions rather than resolving into a single genealogy. The existential and dreamlike cinema of Fellini and Cocteau intersects with questions of social performance, institutional discipline, and the politics of the gaze; Cartesian distinctions between sensory perception and immutable essence encounter Buddhist ideas of impermanence and "suchness." Art-historical images associated with idealized bodies and established structures of looking are fragmented or redirected. Cultural artifacts, meanwhile, become sites at which preservation and control can become difficult to distinguish. Across these encounters, inherited systems of meaning are neither rejected nor passively reproduced. They are placed into unstable relationships in which their authority can be tested again.
This process is also embedded in the unusual material construction of the paintings. Huang Chih-Cheng & Hao work with ink, pigment, and watercolor over gold and silver foil on jangji paper, drawing on the historical use of metallic surfaces in East Asian interiors. Before electric illumination, gold and silver leaf did not function solely as ornament: their reflective surfaces gathered faint natural or candlelight and redistributed it through darkened spaces. For the artists, this historical relationship between material and illumination becomes both a technical principle and a conceptual device. Light is not simply something that falls upon the painting; it activates it.
The metallic surface makes vision contingent. Depending on the position of the viewer and the changing conditions of light, an image can sharpen, dissolve, disappear into glare, and re-emerge. Repeated smudging and erasure further destabilize the figurative image, giving the paintings the suspended quality of film stills detached from a complete narrative. Something appears to have happened immediately before the depicted moment, or seems about to happen immediately after it, but the sequence remains inaccessible. The image exists as a threshold rather than a conclusion.
To see these paintings therefore requires movement. The viewer must approach and withdraw, shift position, and wait for forms to reveal themselves. Looking becomes temporal and corporeal: the body participates in producing what can be seen. In this sense, the foil reverses the conventional relationship between image and support. Rather than serving as a passive ground, it continually interferes with the image laid upon it, drawing attention away from representation and toward light itself.
This relationship between appearance and disappearance echoes the philosophical tensions running throughout Huang Chih-Cheng & Hao’s practice: between permanence and transience, material and immaterial, control and surrender, the social self and an interior self that remains resistant to definition. Their collaborative structure adds another dimension to this inquiry. Working under a shared artistic identity, two individuals continually negotiate authorship and autonomy, allowing the conditions of collaboration itself to mirror their broader concern with where one subject ends and another begins.
"Stalker" ultimately describes not an object of pursuit but a condition of attention. The viewer moves through images that cannot be possessed from a single vantage point, following traces across reflective surfaces while continually confronting the limits of perception. The closer one looks, the less stable the distinction becomes between seeing and searching, surface and depth, image and light. What initially appears to be an encounter with representation gradually turns inward, toward a more difficult question at the core of Huang Chih-Cheng & Hao’s practice: how do we locate ourselves within the histories, images, desires, and systems through which we have learned to see?
