Huidi Xiang, Sculptor

Sculpting a Point of View on Labor Issues

A 3D printed sculpture of a broom, easily recognized from Disney’s “Fantasia,” looks like it’s crumbled into a corner from exhaustion, while stars spill across the floor from a nearby bucket. At first pass, they seem like whimsical artifacts from a beloved cartoon. But sculptor Huidi Xiang (CFA 2021) hopes they’ll make audiences think about who does manual work, drawing a tie between Mickey’s magic labor to clean up his mess and the not-so-magic labor here in the real world, which is often messy in its own right.

“My work borrows language from cartoons like Disney films, but I like to reverse the original narratives to expose the invisible part of the onstage moral they're trying to deliver,” Huidi says.

Works featuring recognizable characters and objects pulled from pop culture video games and cartoons have been part of a long list of international exhibitions and residencies. The “Fantasia” series appeared in a solo exhibition with YveYANG at the Discoveries Sector of Art Basel Hong Kong. At the Tutu Gallery in Brooklyn, she presented sculptures inspired by the video game Super Mario Bros. Another recent work shown in New York features the sewing needles and animals from the dressmaking scene in Disney’s “Cinderella.”

“In the ‘Cinderella’ film, I feel it romanticizes the labor of the animal friends making a dress for her,” she says. “It looks like they're doing this out of love and care but in reality, I feel the labor of care and emotion are under-compensated, especially within domestic settings and from women.”

“In mass media, a magical facade is often used to sugarcoat this reality. My work seeks to critically examine this facade while celebrating the invisible heroes of marginalized laborers.”

Story by Elizabeth Speed