Cindy Huang 黄馨贤
Landings

Cindy Huang 黄馨贤 is an artist whose practice is informed by her lived experience as tauiwi, a New Zealander of Chinese descent, with her research drawing upon the legacies and traditions of both cultures and lands. Her work poetically engages with specific social histories and narratives, as she seeks to explore ideas of manakitanga—exchange, generosity and adjacency.

For her first international solo exhibition, Landings, Huang will present and extend her recent work Tracing a gilded trail (2023-). This expansive, floor-based work comprises some 1000 sculptural elements in glazed porcelain, hand-made and painted by the artist. Dispersed across the entire gallery, these lily flowers explore the relationship of the body to the land. These flowers were supposedly brought by Chinese sojourners working in the Victorian-era gold rushes in Aotearoa New Zealand (prevalent across Australia during similar periods) and often connected with processes of mourning in present day. Through this gesture, the artist evokes what it is for bodies to pass, to be buried within, and connected with land as Tangata Tiriti—people of the treaty. 

Alongside this work, Huang is producing a new modular sculptural installation comprising hand-made ceramic tiles embedded with pāua shells, a species of abalone unique to New Zealand and distinct for their multi-coloured interior. Through this work, the artist connects with her family’s small-town fish and chips and Chinese restaurant and takeaway, complicating their connectivity to the lands and waters of New Zealand.

Cindy Huang lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Selected recent exhibitions include Pleasure Garden, Objectspace, Christchurch (2025); Offering, Hastings Art Gallery, Hastings (2024); Tracing a gilded trail, Sumer, Auckland (2023); Cindy Huang, Te Atamira, Queenstown (2023); Nova, Sumer, Auckland (2023); Twin Cultivation, Satellites, Auckland (2022); A Footnote on New Zealand History, Corban Estate Arts Centre, Auckland (2021); and The Beaglehole’s Problem, Meanwhile, Wellington (2020).