Meet the 2024 Fellows: Ai-Chun Huang
Published: May 20, 2024
Categories: Artist Interviews
About Artist Trust Fellowships
Artist Trust Fellowships are merit-based awards of $10,000 providing unrestricted support to practicing professional artists of exceptional talent and ability residing in Washington State. The first Artist Trust Fellowship Awards were selected in 1987, making it our longest-running award program. In 2024, $150,000 was awarded to 15 artists across five Washington State counties.
Our Meet the Fellows series highlights each of the award winners over the year in a series of interviews, talks, blog posts, and social media highlights. To support grants programs like the Artist Trust Fellowships, visit artisttrust.org/donate
Interview with 2024 Artist Trust Fellowship Recipient Ai-Chun Huang
Please introduce yourself and share a little about yourself and your background
I am a multimedia artist originally from Taiwan, specializing in experimental animations, painting, digital installation, public art, or any inspirational resources that come to hand. I like to put artistic and experimental elements into my artworks and share my provoking ideas with people. I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from National Taiwan Normal University, and a Master of Fine Arts from National Taiwan University of Arts.
My artworks create poetic metaphor and descriptive context with contemporary cultural images of Asian families, especially interpretation of the female role in society as it relates to my roots, my home, and my culture. My artworks focus on life’s limitations and social expectations from an Asian immigrant woman’s perspective and use metaphors from my Asian cultural icons. In recent years, I experienced “being a mother” and “moving to the USA as an immigrant,” and “building my own family.” I’m confused about the meaning of “home” because I am away from home and trying to pursue my new ideal life in the USA. Wandering between home and other far destinations, I try to find my own definition of belonging and dreams. My art tells a time-and-space-limited story and still positively dreams of the ideal home and family.
I’m also a nomad artist who likes to travel with my kids. I really like to combine traveling and art practice together. Traveling the world can help me input new inspirations, and creating art is to output what I absorb and digest from my body. I was trained in the fine arts industry for 20 years, and art became a major way to express myself and my life’s perspective. I feel so much joy and gain self-achievement through making art, and I will keep moving for my whole life.
Ai-Chun Huang with her artwork, The Holy Mountain and Brave to be you
The way your multimedia work comments on the social expectations Asian communities face is energizing. Can you talk more about how you use different mediums to challenge these expectations?
I am an artist who likes to make the best use of any inspirational resources at hand. I like to travel around, which means I cannot always carry too many physical art materials with me. Therefore, I am flexible and interested in exploring different medium’s specialties and trying to find something I can use for expressing my artistic ideas. I really enjoy switching to different mediums and finding something new. Embracing the unknown makes me explore my capability and see different sides of myself. Recently, I joined several public art projects in the Greater Seattle Area, and I learned so many practical experiences with local artists and communities. Since my medium focuses on visual communication skills, it is not very hard for me to switch to different platforms.
When I do a solo art project, I can dive deeper into self-reflection. As for the public art projects, I enjoy meeting different people and making larger scale projects. There is always something unknown waiting for me. I am so grateful and joyful to choose art practice as my life’s career. No matter the project, it helps me find myself and try my limit, extend my skills, honestly face myself, and complete myself through my art practice.
As for my animations, with so many Asian urban elements, the animated patterns of high-rise buildings, apartment windows, and overall repetition in my animations, like in “Crowded Dreams” and “Manipulation of Life,” are very crucial in my art language.
I grew up in a busy city, which is what I depict in my animation. I witnessed the urbanizing transformation of my hometown, Taiwan. Endless repetition of apartment units occupied my eyesight year by year. When I was little, I originally could see a part of the far away mountain from the window in my room, but as the years went by, the scenery became a concrete jungle mountain. I also incorporated this “urban sprawl” interpretation in another animation, “the Holy Mountain.” I use my artworks to tell my story and to share a collective memory from others who have experienced over-developing urbanization, and buildings rapidly cropping up within a few seconds, which is why I combined mobile phone scrolling gestures with these endless rising buildings together. I like to remind myself how many desires we have and the greediness of humans that were stuck in this crowded city. Besides, I am so fascinated by those repetitive patterns because they have a very strong ability to overwhelm people’s brain and eyes, so it is another way to remind people of overwhelming information, work tasks, duties, desires, expectations…too many things come into our brain like a bombardment in this modern society. Sometimes I really thank the animation media, I can freely express this constant repetition idea by adding a timeline which is different from still visual images, and it is also a good way to train myself how to tell a good story in my unique perspective. I enjoy switching through mediums to bring myself so many flexibilities and creativities.
Scenes from The Holy Mountain
Art is constantly changing and developing. How has your work developed over the last few years? What keeps your creative practice moving forward? Why do you create?
I like to travel and stay out of my comfort zone. I really like to combine traveling and art practice together, so this ever-changing environment generates a lot of new ideas, and even a switch to a new medium. Traveling the world can help me input new inspirations, and creating art is to output what I absorb and digest from my body.
When I was in my kindergarten age, I was very interested in art crafting and explored all kinds of arts media. This was how I started my art journey. I went to art-gifted class in my middle school and I made up my mind to continue studying art at a very early age. Therefore, I finished my bachelor’s and master’s degrees both in fine arts and visual design in Taiwan. I explored a lot of media in my college, like sketching, acrylic painting, Chinese ink painting, print painting, digital art, sculpture, art installation, etc. I have a very solid foundation of art practice and control the specialty of each media. I am thankful that I gained so many experiences, and now they become my unique skills when I encounter different art projects. Art is a major way to express myself and my life perspective. I feel so much joy and self-achievement through making art.
For the past few years, digital animations have become one of my most important mediums to fully express my ideas. Because of my travel limitation, and my other role as UX/UI designer, I spend more time on digital arts, with which I combine art and design together to tell my life story.
As a 2024 Fellowship Recipient, can you please talk about how this award impacts you?
It is a huge honor for me to mark a milestone in my art career. Thanks to Artist Trust for supporting local artists and building the artist network. I really gained so much help and encouragement from Artist Trust. I appreciate my artistic eyes to interpret my life story, and I also feel lucky to be seen and receive so much public recognition to help me go through my self-doubt on my art journey.
Looking back to the very beginning of my art practice, this little kindergarten girl with pure passion and self-motivation created some art and crafts with all kinds of recycled materials. Even though my parents had no budget to send her to some art studio to learn, this little girl still found so many books from the library and self-taught herself to create her own artworks. I want to give this little girl a big applause and a big hug back to 30 years ago. She would never know that she would go this far and make these achievements as an artist. I am lucky that I am still on my art path and haven’t given up. Artist Trust became one of the people noticing me and accompanying me on this road. I will definitely keep moving and making art around the world.
Still image from Nomad Chaos
How can Artist Trust continue to support artists across Washington State?
I truly feel lucky to have the Artist Trust platform to help me engage with the local artist community in WA. They not only collect all kinds of artist open-call opportunities for us, but also hold both in-person and online events/ workshops for us to network and share experiences with each other. As an immigrant artist here, I’ve truly gained so much warm support and so many useful experiences from them. It is very challenging for a new person trying to build up a network in a new environment, but because of Artist Trust, I’ve connected with people easily. We have the same interest in this artist group, which makes us stick together and become stronger. As I mentioned above, it is how Artist Trust helps us in so many ways, like funding, collecting all kinds of artist opportunity information, providing artist awards and grants, workshops, hosting artist events, I really appreciate everything Artist Trust has done for the Washington art community. Its contributions help enrich this society with creativity and uniqueness.
Why is it important to support individual artists right now?
Just like Artist Trust’s core value,
“We build stronger relationships with artists by respecting their voice, elevating their expertise, and creating systems that positively impact their development and success. We exist because of artists.”
I am sincerely grateful for the Artist Trust grants putting local artists’ needs first. These grants not only physically support us with money but also present the key value of art’s existence in society. It reminds us of how important it is to have all kinds of artwork enriching our life.
Artists use our artistic language to record humanity’s’ life and stories, to convey the important value of existence. Artists enrich our world with so much creativity, and they are so priceless and irreplaceable. Thanks again for seeing us as an important part of society with encouragement and sincere support.
2024 Meet The FellowsArtist Trust Fellowship AwardsInterview
