Today we’d like to introduce you to Wenhao Huang.
Hi Wenhao, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m not even sure, at this moment, if it was a thoughtful decision or a whimsical impromptu for me to change my major from Environmental Science to Architecture. My older brother is the role model type of sibling, and he is a M.D.. He has indefinitely influenced me, especially growing up when I needed it. I started to play World of Warcraft when he discouraged me from playing Perfect World. I started to like AC Milan after months of him touting how cool Kaka is. I started to enjoy all kinds of science after he bought me A Brief History of Time as my birthday gift. I started to visit him in his lab because the way he talks about the wording of medical journals and articles sounded so goddamn cool. It took me many visits to his lab to cultivate the spirit of becoming a science student.
Of course, that was after his “gentle” threatening that I should not join his path of medicine because he cherishes his biological younger brother. It is oddly different to be a doctor in China than what you understand being a doctor here in the States. Then it was really not surprising for me, as a prospective high school graduate, to envision a future that is more or less at the middle ground of everything that may or may not have some ties to medicine. Just a hint of biology, a tad of chemistry, maybe some physics, and a bit of geology.
Apparently, I was not satisfied. As naive as it sounds, I still wanted to beat on the boat against the currents and see the twilight of Jay Gatsby. Or, as cynical as it seems, I still wanted to satirize society with my weekly blogs. Not that studying Science took away the chances of immersing myself into the so-called art world, but I could not resist wanting more of it. So again, unsurprisingly, I situated myself in another middle ground of everything: Architecture. 15mL of Science, 15mL of Literature, maybe another 30mL of design? Of course, at that very moment, I had 0mL of understanding of how much weight “design” could carry.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I am going to fake a yes, just so all the random dots in my story connect smoothly, haha. Now, am I sounding like a real person who studied architecture and lost his mind?
So no, it was not a smooth road at all. There were quite a lot of difficulties. I did not have any art background when I changed my major. My last memory associated with drawing something was the day I quit my drawing hobby class because my classmate threw away my watercolor pen over the fact that I had more colors than him. I had a fear of making up things or drawing things. What if the thing I drew does not look like what I wanted? Of course, that was an easy fix because I went to a school that does not really need good drawing skills. But I did have many other less childish fears and anxieties over things; I’m having such fear writing this interview right now. Sometimes, these fears are really annoying. You can’t stop thinking about things you cannot fix or change anymore. What if I add this paragraph to the paper I already submitted? What if I did not say that to my employer? What if I used resin print rather than regular 3D print? Nothing helped stop me from these mental frictions. It is not completely meaningless though, at least I kinda of know where I am heading to with all the time squandered there. In that sense, maybe it is actually a smooth road?
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
In the retrospective of my seemingly impaired decision-making skill, I do see dots connected – what I pursued is always fraught with fringes of everything, one circle encircled by the other circle. Now, it seems much more reasonable than coincidental that I enjoyed doing AI StyleGAN training when I was in my undergrad. You blend categories of photographs together to cook for something shocking, uncanny. 800 counts of Tiffany lamps as the main ingredient, 500 counts of mushrooms as the side i, 200 counts of sea creatures as the seasoning. By knowingly mixing up all these photographs of the known together, you can expect something, again, right at the fringes of all that is known. What AI identified are 50mL of lamps, 85mL of mushrooms, and 10mL of sea creatures, and I want to call them the signs of the conventional world; because what AI knowingly yielded is a meaningless hybrid, a hybrid of signs, qualities, and behaviors. And I am ceaselessly looking for these known characteristics, or you can call them memories. Then, our belief and familiarity with all these memories conjure up moments of estrangement from those known names – Lamp? Maybe not. Sea horse? I’m not sure. But it looks cute.
When estranged, we automatically come up with questions. Questions are good. You are led to see the object presented differently, or to a larger extent, the world differently. And I want to call such processes translations, just like the rumor of seeing a lamp made of the flesh of a seahorse. We are constantly translating signals of everything, every day – and that to me seems to be the weight the word “design” carries. I would swallow that architecture pill right now and yell that architecture is indeed everything if the pill had not been invented by Hans Hollein in the postmodernism era.
See, it’s another case of being in the middle of everything. A bit like a cookbook, a tad like a medical lab, a hint of (pseudo-)science, and a chunk of that art world I wanted – either one in parallel or intersecting with the other. But this time, it is not so retrospective. As historical and memorable as my interest sounds, it is really about a/many future(s), as long as the translation is still going. And I’m very sure it is.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
Instagram: @_oahnew E-Mail: [email protected]
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_oahnew/
Image Credits
Image 1: In Collaboration with Kevin Foley Image 2-8: In Collaboration with Shelley “Siyu” Luo
